The 10 most common mistakes made by English learners

As English academies, we know perfectly well what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong when learning English, and at KSE Academy we want to help you.

English language academies and English teachers see and learn many things over the years. With this, we learn to identify and categorise English students and candidates for Cambridge English exams quite quickly and accurately, although we are not perfect and sometimes make mistakes. The thing is, with experience, one realises that there are certain patterns, good and bad, that tend to repeat themselves in good and bad students, respectively. And if there is something important when we talk about learning English, or practically anything else, it is study and learning patterns. Therefore, and so that we are all more aware of what is right and what is wrong when we study English, I bring you this post with the *10 most typical mistakes of the English student*. Let’s get started!

1. Hello, I’m a final-year student and I need B1 for tomorrow

Okay, «tomorrow» is an exaggeration, but not that, that big ????. The conversation usually goes like this:

Student: Hello, I’m a final-year student and I need B1.

Academy: Hello, very good. What have you done in English before?

Student: Well, nothing since high school, I haven’t touched it.

Academy: How long ago was that?

Student: About 4 years.

Academy: And when do you need the B1 by?

Student: Before June, I have to close my academic record.

Academy:

Okay, I guess you get the idea. Seriously, you don’t know how typical this is. At English language academies, we experience this situation almost daily. Many young people come to study in Granada, or any city, and make the mistake of forgetting about studying English until they see the writing on the wall, in this case, the closing of their academic record, and find themselves another year without being able to study a master’s degree or look for work because they left English parked for 4 years. In this sense, we must bear several things in mind:

• Don’t leave English until the final year. In fact, you shouldn’t leave it for even a single year. As soon as you finish high school, encourage yourself to look for an academy or an English teacher in Granada. You’ll have fresh English from school and it will be much easier for you to continue learning and finally get your much-desired B1.
• If you’re not good at English, why give up? If you’re not good at something, you should dedicate more time and effort to it. It’s logical. Don’t postpone the inevitable. Go for it and prove to yourself that you can do it!

2. I don’t want to learn English, I just want to pass the exam

Come again, I don’t think I heard you properly. You want to pass an English exam without learning English? You just want to pass the exam? Okay, imagine you’re a personal trainer and I say to you: «Look, I don’t want to gain stamina to run a marathon, what I want is to run the marathon, so tell me how it’s done.»; or that you’re an Anatomy professor and I say: «Look, I want to pass the Anatomy subject, but I don’t want to learn the parts of the body.»

It is important to bear the following in mind: while there are exam techniques that will help you pass, ultimately the exam evaluates your knowledge of English, so forget about a supposed magic formula that will make you pass an English exam without learning English. Therefore, I recommend you simply focus on learning everything you can, because what is truly important is not the Cambridge, Trinity or EOI certificate, but your English.

3. Okay, I’m signing up. Now, «teach me!»

Yes, yes, «teach me» is what I call this phenomenon that, unfortunately, is very, very common. Many students I have encountered in my life as an English teacher have adopted an extremely passive attitude. That is, their theory was that if they came to my classes, they would automatically learn. I’m sorry to tell you that it doesn’t work like that. And I’m sorry to tell you that any self-respecting English teacher or any other teacher will tell you the same thing.

In any class, you can learn a lot, a whole lot, but if you don’t put in any effort inside and outside the classroom, what you do in the classroom will stay there, in the classroom, and won’t have been of much use to you. To avoid this, I recommend the following:

• Participate in class and be active. There is nothing worse than a student who doesn’t speak or participate in class activities.
• Review at home what you have seen in class. If one day they teach you to spell, go home and spell; if one day they teach you comparative sentences, go home and compare; and so on with everything.
• Don’t expect the teacher to do all the work for you. The teacher teaches, but you are the one who learns, and learning is not a passive process. In fact, surely the more active you are in your learning, the faster you will learn.

4. Notebook? Me? What for?

What’s the use of an hour or an hour and a half session with a teacher if you’re not going to take notes? Do you have such a good memory? Earlier I mentioned how important it is to review and work at home, but what are you going to review if you don’t have notes? That’s why it’s extremely important to have a notebook to work with inside and outside the classroom. In this regard, I recommend the following:

• Have a notebook to work with in the classroom, and write down the date of each day and what you are working on.
• It’s a good idea to have another separate notebook to create your own notes and examples. This way, just by writing everything down, you will learn it and you can personalise the explanations as much as you like.
• Keep a list of your most common mistakes. If you write down the mistakes you make in a list, it will be much easier for you to avoid continuing to make them. This is something fundamental that almost no one does.

And this is me when someone writes something in their notebook:

5. What I want is to knuckle down with an intensive course

Okay, intensive English courses are very effective, but it always depends on the student’s level. If, for example, you have just got your B1 with an average or low mark and you intend to do an intensive course to get your B2, I can already tell you that it is very likely you won’t achieve it. It’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely you’ll achieve it. So be very careful with intensive courses. Some academies will have no problem enrolling you in an intensive course, but at least they should warn you of the difficulty you will have in achieving it. Furthermore, if you are not at the right level for it, you will feel quite frustrated and you will most likely give up and have wasted your time and money by rushing into it.

Here’s a B2 student in a C1 intensive course:

6. What I need is to do exams

This mistake is very similar to the previous one. Look, doing exams and mock tests is very useful. I encourage my students to do as many as they can before taking the actual exam. But I only recommend it to those who can benefit from it. And who are they? Those who are already at a similar or equal level to what their exam requires. If you want to take a C1 but your level is barely B2, what’s the use of doing exams whose texts you don’t even understand well? All you will achieve is frustration and discouragement.

7. Oh, I got 20 questions wrong. Next exam!

Come on, I’m going to ask you a question: What are mistakes for? Seriously, what does a mistake tell us? A mistake in an exam or an exercise tells us very effectively where we are failing and where we should invest more time studying. For this reason, every time you do an exam, an exercise, a writing task or whatever, and your teacher corrects it, don’t think: «Oh, I failed this exam. I’ll have better luck next time.» No! Simply take the exam, review the mistakes and write them down in the notebook I told you about in point 4, the notebook of your most common mistakes.

8. But are they a native speaker?

This question is frequently asked in English language academies, especially in cities like Granada. But it’s a shame that instead of focusing on whether the teacher is qualified or experienced, we simply ask if they are foreign or not. Imagine yourself in Germany, would you stand in front of a class and teach Spanish? Do you feel capable? Normally, if you haven’t studied anything related to Castilian Spanish, you wouldn’t feel capable or qualified for it. For this reason, it is very important not only the teacher’s level of English, which is also important, but the fact that this person has received adequate preparation to properly teach an English class. If the teacher is qualified and has a good level of English, they don’t need to be a native speaker to give a student the best possible preparation to learn English. Moreover, from my point of view, a bilingual person with a good knowledge of your mother tongue and English will probably be more effective than a person who only masters English.

9. I’ve finished my homework, now I can relax!

No, no, and no! This isn’t high school, and it shouldn’t even be like that in high school. The homework that English teachers assign is merely a reinforcement of what we’ve covered in class, extra practice, but it constitutes the minimum and necessary to keep moving forward. However, if you only stick to homework, your learning will be quite poor and you probably won’t reach your goal in the time you set. English should not be conceived as a subject, but as what it is: a language. There are so many things you can do with a language that it’s a shame for someone to simply limit themselves to filling in the blanks. I encourage you to read interesting articles from magazines or internet blogs, to learn English by watching series and films, to use mobile apps and other web resources to continue learning at home, and a long etc.

10. I know I’m well below level, but I have to get B2

We must learn to see learning as a continuous line, which never breaks. If you imagine it as a graph, English learning will go upwards and its evolution will be directly proportional to the effort we invest, or at least in most cases. And for learning, the most important thing is to choose the right resources for our level. That is, if I have a C1 level and work with B1 materials, I will probably learn little or nothing. But the same happens the other way around, if you want a B2 English certificate and haven’t yet passed B1 and B1+ levels, you won’t achieve much by working with B2 materials, at least in most cases.

When some English language academies insist that you don’t enrol in a course higher than your level, it’s not because we are bad or greedy (at least in serious academies), but because we know that starting at a level that is not appropriate for you will not bring you anything good. It’s like what we mentioned about intensive courses or only doing exams. If you are not at the right level, it’s better not to do it, for your own good.

Bonus mistake: I already have B1, why do I need more?

Okay, let me be clear that I don’t mean everyone has to reach C2. But be realistic. Nowadays, everyone will have a B1 when they finish their degree. That is, the baseline is B1. If 40 people with your same qualification apply for the same job as you, don’t you think the company will use English proficiency, among other factors, to filter candidates? Well, if among those people there are 15 with B2 and 5 with C1, it is very likely that they won’t even bother to interview the remaining 20 who only have a B1. For this reason, apart from the world of possibilities that a second language opens up for you, I encourage you not to settle for the minimum. Have more ambition and keep striving to learn English, because the higher you go, the better it will be for your academic and professional future. I can assure you of that.

And now tell me the truth in the comments, how many of these learning mistakes have you ever made? Don’t worry, as I said, they are very common, and they are part of daily life in English language academies. Also, don’t worry because soon, very soon, I will bring you another post with 10 things you should do as an English student to succeed in your learning.

I hope this post has been useful to you.

Until the next article, don’t forget to keep smiling!