I’m always learning English. All the movies that I watch, books that I read, or podcasts that I listen to are in English. It’s so easy to introduce English into your life, but it’s so difficult to disconnect from it. When you are passively learning, it is hard to detect your progress as you are constantly improving.
This doesn’t happen when you follow a course or prepare for a certification. In those contexts, you test yourself regularly and you see your improvements. However, there are some reasons why I am not such a big fan of certifications and courses.
Certifications are sometimes needed for selection processes or other bureaucracy, but they are not normally useful for life. I know some people with Cambridge B2 that can not have a fluent conversation with a native English person, or maybe they do not know what ‘gotta’ or ‘gonna’ mean. I feel that the main reason is on the course side.
Most people (at least in my country) think that learning English is doing an intensive course of 100 hours to prepare yourself to get a specific certification. Although they are so helpful for that, they don’t teach you English, they only give you tips and hacks to get a better score on the exam. I’m not criticizing that it’s a good way to get these needed certifications for a legal process, scholarship, or maybe for work. However, for a real situation, why I would like to know how to compare two images perfectly in one minute if I will never be in that situation.
Here is when the about-face comes: I am going to get an English certification. I do not even need and nobody asked me to have it. The main reason why I just want to have it it’s to have a due date to finish my English learning. This does not mean that I am going to stop learning English completely when I pass the exam but this process will help me to get a little bit of pressure to continue studying until this date and then it will give me some sort of relaxation after completing my goal.
For that reason, I will try to be consistent here posting writings about different topics. I’ll see you at the next one.
I agree with your stance on certifications. That is true, how some people want to trust their test scores completely to know if they've mastered a language or not. Good luck with your exam; I'm sure you'll do well.
I agree with you too, "teaching to the test" is a real problem, and many of the test questions are frustratingly poor. But actually, nowadays I teach a test prep class (TOEFL) and actually I like teaching it. I try to emphasize the skills that I know students need in real life, like taking good notes and learning lots of vocabulary. It's true that you will probably never have to describe the difference between two pictures in one minute, but you might need to describe the difference between two proposals, or two books, or something similar, and only have a moment to prepare -- I try to see the tasks that way. Hopefully you can find a good teacher and enjoy the process! Good luck!
@KatyaBarta I don't know much about TOEFL but I did TOEIC some time ago (I think they are similar, right?). I really like this exam. I feel that having to answer a lot of questions in a short amount of time is the best way to test your English. You don't really have time to think about the hacks that you usually use to complete grammar exercises, you have to choose the option that sounds better for you.
I think it's the one that I am going to choose for my certification.