The number 1 thing that got me from B2 to C1 level.

Looking for a book to help you fall in love with reading again? Here are my favourite books: 

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

 If this episode helped you, make sure you subscribe or follow the podcast so you don’t miss next week’s training, and if you need help with your English, send me a message on Instagram and let's chat. 

Learn more about our courses here: 

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Good morning, everybody. This is the Cambridge Advanced Accelerator podcast. My name is Cheryl, and I'm here to help you with all things connected to advancing your English and smashing your Cambridge Advanced exam. So, what are we talking about this week? So, today I wanted to tell you the number one thing that has helped me improve my Spanish. So my Spanish is C1 level now. But for a long time I kind of got stuck at B2 level, and you know I got up to B2 level quite quickly, like within a year. I I live in Tenerife in Spain. So when I first moved over here, I went to uh classes, intensive classes every day for about six weeks. Um, and then after that, I kind of studied by myself once I kind of got the foundations and fairly quickly got myself up to about B2 level. But from there, there was a bit of a plateau. It was quite it was quite difficult to one, keep the motivation because your progress, I think the higher you get in a language, the slower your progress is, or or the slower it feels. Because when you first start learning, suddenly everything is new, and you know, from one day to the other you feel like you're improving. But at these higher levels, uh you've already learned all the grammar. By B2 level, you've learned all the grammar that exists in English or in whatever language it is. There's no secret magical C1 or C2 grammar that we've been hiding from you. Uh the idea at getting up to these C1 and C2 levels is not new grammar. It's being able to use these more without thinking, to be able to use them effortlessly without making mistakes, uh, to be able to know the appropriate language and vocabulary for certain situations, whether we need to speak in an academic tone, a formal tone, an informal tone. This is what really happens is it's the nuances of the language when we get up to that uh C1 and C2 level. And this may mean learning more vocabulary. Um for example, if you've been learning loads of informal vocabulary, phrasal verbs, and things, you might need to learn the academic equivalence of these, and vice versa. Um, so that was kind of the stage I was at with my Spanish. It's like I could do everything, I could go to the doctors, go to the shops, have chats with with friends, I could do everything, but it wasn't effortless yet. And sometimes I was missing some vocabulary. So, what was the number one thing that helped me kind of get past this uh this plateau at B2? What was the one number one thing that pushed me? And you'll be surprised by this, but the number one thing that helped me was reading more. Reading more books in Spanish significantly improved absolutely everything. Not just my vocabulary, not just my reading ability, it helped me with absolutely everything. And I see this time and time again with students who are preparing with me for the Cambridge Advanced exam. The students who read more do better in the exam. And I'm not talking about just doing more reading exams. This is an error, just doing exam after exam after exam, thinking that just more practice of exam tasks is going to improve our scores. This is not the case. We have to do things out with exam tasks to improve our level. And reading is one of the best things that can help with absolutely every single part of your exam and with your level. So, why? And what exactly can we do and how should we be reading? So, first off, speaking to my students who join our book club every month. So, we have an optional book club every month on our Cambridge Advanced courses where we choose a book each month, and then at the end of the month we get together and talk about the book and have a chat and a discussion about it. So, what do those students tell me are the main benefits for them from joining book club, from reading a book in English? So there are four main things that I hear time and time and time again. Okay, the first one, and probably the most interesting one, is that students improve their focus. In a world where we are distracted by our phones constantly, uh often a problem with the Cambridge Advanced exams is students tell me that they lose their focus during the exam. They can't concentrate for long periods of time. Uh so when they're doing the reading exam, when they get to the final reading task, their marks are dropping because they're tired and they're losing their focus and they can't concentrate. And this is really, really common. But think about it with our phones. What are we reading on our phones? We're reading things on Facebook, on social media, on TikTok. Uh, we're not even uh reading our search results on Google anymore. You've got a little AI summary at the top of that. Um articles that that we're reading, if we're reading articles, uh, have been bullet pointed at the bottom and we're just kind of skimming through them. So all this has meant that our ability to sit down and read for longer than two minutes has been severely reduced year after year after year. That's why book club or reading in English, this is forcing you to read for longer periods of time, to sit down for an hour and enjoy a book. Uh, if you can't do that to start with, obviously start with 10 minutes and build it up. In fact, I had many students when they joined and they read their first ever book with me in English, they said the first few chapters they found really difficult. They found it hard to focus because they weren't used to it. They didn't read books in their own language either. They found it really difficult. But as they got into the story, as they started to enjoy it, then they found that after a few weeks, when they were getting into the middle of the book, they found that they were sitting reading for an hour or even more, and they didn't even realize it, that the time flew by because they were immersed and engrossed in the story, and um they found that they had that ability back to concentrate and to focus, and that was something that they could take into their job, into their work, and improve their uh attention span and focus at work, um, and into the reading exam as well, that they found it much much easier to focus after they got used to this. Okay, so this is one thing that you will see start to increase. Not immediately it's going to be difficult at first, but you will see it happen. Your focus, and this can be the difference between passing and failing your exam, your ability to focus. Second thing that they always mention is their uh the speed of their reading. That a lot of people, when they when they start reading in English, um they say that they're really, really slow at reading, and they find it difficult to finish the reading exam uh in time because they're a slow reader, or because they have to read things over and over and over and over to understand the meaning of it. So what the second thing that people say is by reading books in English, that speed of reading starts to increase. I can now read, like I read, so our book clubs each month, I read the book in Spanish, my students read the book in English, and I read the book in Spanish, so that I keep pushing and um practicing my Spanish as well. And I notice now like I can read at the same speed in in English and in Spanish, it's not uh an issue for me, but I've also because I read at least one book every single month, my reading speed in general has greatly increased, and my ability to understand information and process it uh faster has also increased. So this is going to be the same for you. The more you read, then you're faster you're going to get at reading, and then this is going to help you when it comes to your exam. Third thing that people always mention is vocabulary. The satisfaction of you've been practicing various fixed expressions and phrases, uh, you've been practicing them, and then you go and you read the book and you see them in context. This is so satisfying. Or you've been practicing a grammar point, and you go uh to the book and you're reading it and you notice that grammar point being used in context. This is hugely satisfying, um, but it's also going to help you with all aspects of your language skills by seeing that. So by seeing language being used in context, you don't need to be kind of memorizing grammar rules or um or thinking about exactly how to use things, uh use language by seeing that in context, by noticing these sentence patterns, these collocations, these structures. So this is going to help you become a better writer. It's going to expose you to all that language, but also good organization in your writing, linking phrases, paragraph structure, the tone, how to express your ideas, how to express your opinions. It's going to expose you to all of this lovely lovely examples of language in use. And then this is going to help you when you go to write, when you go to speak. This is going to help you know how to use these things correctly. And this is going to help you with your vocabulary in terms of the more exposure that you have to vocabulary, the more you see it in context, then the easier it is to remember. You then need to go away and use it when you're speaking and you're writing to activate it. But you need to see language being used around 10 times in context before you have a good idea of how to how to use it. And then you need to actually use it around 10 times for it to stick in your brain when you want to use it when you're speaking, you're writing. So this is something that my students always tell me that improves with reading is that exposure to all that language content, and on top of that, learning new vocabulary and expressions and phrases as well. So if you've ever been thinking about trying a book in English, do it this month. Uh, if you've never read a book before in English, I'd recommend starting with a self-development book, something like Atomic Habits. Uh, this one month with my students, we're reading Mel Robbins, uh, Let Them Theory. These books are pretty easy to read in another language. These books are around kind of a high B2 level. Okay, so start with one of those. After that, what's the best book for you to read? Whatever you want, whatever interests you. If if I recommend a book, but it's on the topic that you hate or would never read normally, then you're not gonna have much motivation to read it. Pick something that you love, that you enjoy. Uh pick a book that you've been dying to read and read it in English. I'm gonna leave in the captions in the comment section of this podcast, I'm gonna leave my top ten favourite books ever to give you um give you a place to start. If you're if you're not sure, you can uh you can try one of my recommendations, okay? Um so this is reading books. Second thing to think about, which is more exam-oriented, is reading newspaper articles, particularly from the Guardian newspaper. This is where the majority of the exam texts are coming from. So we want to get used to reading these kind of uh heavy, kind of more serious, more academic texts, and we're reading around topics that we wouldn't normally read around. So you're gonna see a lot of texts on nature, animals, the environment, for example. And we need to get comfortable reading around these topics. So I'd highly recommend if, for example, you're doing a reading exam, or indeed a listening exam, um, and you found a topic particularly challenging in that exam, then I wouldn't I wouldn't recommend just doing like okay, reading part seven, that was really difficult. I'm just gonna do 10 more reading part seven exercises. I would never recommend doing that. Okay. What I would recommend is thinking about the topic of that reading. What was the topic? Go and read some similar articles to that topic to increase your vocabulary, but again, also to look at noticing of the good organization, the linking phrases, the paragraph structures, the tone, the sentence patterns, the collocations on that topic. That is going to be extremely beneficial for you when you go to do another exam. Should we just do loads of practice tests, one after the other, one after the other? Why did I say that was not a good idea? Okay, because we always want to learn from our mistakes. We always want to make sure we're analyzing why did we get that wrong? What happened? Okay, we need to fix that first. We need to fix why did we get that wrong before we do another test. Otherwise, we're just gonna remiss we're just gonna repeat the same mistakes over and over and over in the next test. Okay, um, so always think about why you got something wrong, fix that first, which is often um needing to develop our reading skills in general, and then try again. Okay, this is not an overnight magical process, okay. You're not going to read a book for two days or read newspaper articles for a week and suddenly be a better reader. This is something that is a long-term plan, okay. Is the long game that we're playing here, but I guarantee you if you start doing this on a regular basis, you will see a huge improvement to your English overall, and it's going to help you with that jump up to that C1 level. Okay, so uh some food for thought there. I'd love to know what book are you gonna read next, and uh yeah, guys, let me know in the comments if you have any questions. See you in the next one.