How to Track and Measure Your Spanish Learning Progress
If you’re studying Spanish, odds are that at some point you will want to track your learning progress and measure your language fluency. By doing that, you’ll be able to acknowledge how far you have come in your Spanish learning efforts.
Tracking your progress and measuring your fluency are crucial parts of your language learning process. Keep reading to learn the benefits of these practices, the differences between them, and how to better keep track of your learning progress, and measure language fluency.
Benefits of Tracking and Measuring Your Language Learning Progress
Tracking your language learning progress and measuring your language fluency are important tools that help you to improve your Spanish. The benefits of these practices are varied. Let’s explore some of them.
A Reference Point
By keeping track of your learning progress and achievements, you get to have a reference point that allows you to see by yourself how far you’ve come, and how much you still have to go to get where you want to be with your Spanish skills.
Motivation
Tracking your learning progress also works as a motivation tool, especially on those days when you’re a bit exhausted and you feel you’re not making as much progress as you wish. Looking at your learning progress chart reminds you how much you have actually improved, and how that chart will look in a few weeks or months.
Goal Setting
Another of the main benefits of tracking your learning progress is that it helps you set your goals. By using a learning progress tracker, you can easily visualize a point in the near future when you expect to achieve a specific language learning goal. Having that reference point also allows you to set SMART goals according to your own situation, and learning progress.
Make Sure What You’re Doing Is Working
You can learn Spanish in many different ways. Perhaps you attend 1-on-1 lessons with a private teacher, maybe you use an app, or you might decide to find a language learning partner. Tracking your learning progress helps you discover if the method you’re using is actually working for you.
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Differences Between Tracking and Measuring
Although tracking and measuring seem similar concepts, in reality there’s a difference between tracking your learning progress and measuring language fluency.
Tracking is more of a daily or weekly activity. It consists in making annotations of what you learned on a single day, which allows you to revisit it later to see how much you have covered and how far you’ve come.
Measuring, on the other hand, is more like taking a test to measure your language learning progress and applying everything you have learned. This is your opportunity to show your progress to yourself.
How to Track Language Learning Progress
There are many different ways to track your language learning progress. Some are very simple report templates, others include more complex individual learning progress reports, but they all share the same goal: to help you achieve success in your language learning efforts.
Calendar
Calendars are great tools to keep track of anything. You can use a weekly, monthly, or annual calendar depending on your preferences, and keep track of the different Spanish topics you have studied along the way.
Study Journal
If you want to learn how to track learning progress, bullets and studying journals are excellent starting points. A study language journal is basically a notebook specifically designed to keep track of your learning progress.
There are different types of study journals with some spectacular design ideas to make the most of your language learning efforts.
Feel free to download and print this template to start your study journal.
Planner
There are tailor-made language learning planners in the market specifically designed to help language students like you, to keep track of their learning progress. If you’re interested in tracking your progress, this might be one of the best options.
Downloading this planner template can help you to start tracking your progress today.
Apps
As with everything else, these days there’s an app to help you track your language learning habits.
Personally, I find Habit Tracker a very useful app, as it allows you to keep track of not only your habits but also your goals. However, you can find many different apps to help you track your studying habits, some of them even make it interesting by gamifying the experience.
How to Measure Language Fluency
A wide array of different options exist to help you measure language fluency. Let me introduce you to some of the most common ones.
Writing a Journal
Not to confuse with the study journals discussed above, keeping a journal is an excellent way to measure your writing skills over time. Start writing a few lines in Spanish from day one, and with time you’ll see how much you have progressed in your language learning efforts.
Vocabulary Lists
This is a method that I always recommend to my Spanish students. Keeping a list of the words you have learned, helps you in two ways:
- It allows you to go back at the words and re-study them, reinforcing your learning progress.
- It helps you to easily visualize how much you have learned since you started studying Spanish. When you see pages and pages of learned Spanish words, you can’t help it but feel good about yourself and this motivates you to keep going and learn more.
Recording Yourself
Either in video or just audio, recording yourself is the speaking equivalent to writing a journal. It’s a way to keep a “record” of your speaking skills improvement over time.
Perhaps on the first day you’ll be able to say a couple of common phrases, and in a few months you’ll be holding a conversation with a native Spanish speaker. By comparing both recordings, you can measure your learning progress.
Choosing a Framework
There are different language learning frameworks that have standardized proficiency language measuring. It’s important that you choose the one of your preference and keep with it, as it’s the official way of measuring your language level.
Here are some of the main language measuring frameworks.
- Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR)
- The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL)
- The Interagency Language Roundtable (ILR) scale
Taking a Test
Although texts shouldn’t be understood as the ultimate learning progress measuring tool, at some point you need to take a test, especially if you want to certificate your Spanish skills.
There are many tests you can take to measure language fluency in Spanish and reading 10 Websites for You to take a Spanish Fluency Test is an excellent way to start looking for the right one for you.
Improve Your Spanish by Tracking and Measuring Your Progress!
Learning Spanish involves many moving parts, your studying habits, the method you choose, the resources you use. Tracking your learning progress and measuring your language fluency are two more of those moving parts. They both play a key role in advancing you towards Spanish proficiency.
Learning Spanish opens better job opportunities and equips you to talk to more people in the United States. Make a big impact on your progress by speaking with a native speaker! Join us at HSA. Start learning today on a 1-on-1 setting with a certified Spanish teacher from Guatemala.
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