Escaping the Plateau: How to Keep Climbing When Your Language Learning Goes Flat

by Conrad Watts

Except for babies and a small minority of very lucky teens and adults, learning a new language is hard. It’s the type of challenge that requires focus and acceptance that you’re in it for the long haul. The eventual aim for most learners is fluency, but there is a reason many language learners give up before they ever get that far and that’s the so-called ‘plateau’.

Unlike the ‘summit’ — the point at which fluency is achieved and progress is minimal due to an absence of necessity — the plateau usually arrives in the middle of a language learning journey. It’s a dreaded time of little or no change after a period of lively growth. When contrasted with tangible progress being made beforehand, it can be so demoralizing and demotivating that it can lead a student to quit altogether.

“The dreaded ‘plateau’ usually arrives in the middle of a language learning journey and can be so demoralizing and demotivating that it can lead a student to quit altogether.”

According to K. Anders Ericsson, the arrival of the plateau in the process of developing a skill is down to the fact that learning is not progressively linear itself. Ericsson is an internationally recognised research professional in human expertise and performance. His work has led him to believe that the mastery of many types of skills, including language acquisition, does not follow a curve, but rather happens in bursts.

Let’s have a look at typing. When most people learn to type they move fairly quickly from the eyes-on-the-keyboard to the eyes-on-the-screen stage. However, once they arrive at that stage, progress often stops. It’s hard to find someone who never makes an occasional mistake typing on a keyboard, whether it’s hitting the letter adjacent to the intended letter or taking time to find some unusual form of punctuation on the keyboard.

“Mastery of many types of skill, including language acquisition, does not follow a curve, but rather happens in bursts.”

The reason for this — according to the science author, speaker and journalist Joshua Foer — is what’s known as the autonomous stage of skill development. It comes into play when we achieve an acceptable level of proficiency, the acquisition of which took us a great deal of practice and concentration. The autonomous stage is arrived at unconsciously when we relax into our newly acquired skill and — due to an apparent perfection — fail to progress any further.

“Practice does not make perfect — unless the practice itself is perfect.”

This idea dares to challenge the cliched and widely believed mantra ‘practice makes perfect’. It turns out that practice does not make perfect — unless the practice itself is perfect. Ever wondered why the best sports stars and athletes in the world have coaches? If you’re already the best at something, how is some guy who isn’t going to help you?

“During the first phase, known as the ‘cognitive stage,’ you’re intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second ‘associative stage,’ you’re concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach the ‘autonomous stage,’ when you figure that you’ve gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you’re basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you’re doing.”

• Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein (2011)

In Ericsson’s studies of experts and very high achieving people from a wide variety of disciplines, he has learned that they tend to engage with their skills quite differently from the rest of us, who still think that by simply following a practice routine we are likely to achieve our goals. In actual fact, routine hampers progress.

Routine sooner or later leads to the autonomous stage and it will, in time, deliver you directly to the plateau. Ericsson says the habits of highly effective and high-achieving people are all about what he calls ‘deliberate practice’ — the development of strategies to foresee and avoid unconsciously slipping into the autonomous stage.

Routine sooner or later leads to the autonomous stage and it will, in time, deliver you directly to the plateau.

Three things are essential, in Ericsson’s view, in order to achieve mastery of a challenging, long-term skill: getting constant and immediate feedback on one’s performance, constant focus on one’s technique and maintenance of a goal-oriented outlook. Foer seems to agree:

“When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that’s been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly with the level of performance.”

• Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein (2011)

There is another factor involved in the arrival, or apparent arrival at a plateau in language learning. This factor comes directly from the world of economics — the law of diminishing returns. In a direct translation from the world of money, the law of diminishing returns states that the more time you invest in learning a language, the less you will gain in terms of progress.

The reasons for this are simple. For the most part, when learning a new language, gaining fluency in a mere 3,000 words is enough to provide you with a usage that will enable you to understand around 95% of any text you might read in that language and give you relative conversational fluency as well. The remaining five per cent of words come from a massive reservoir of the language that you would need to learn if you were to be perfectly fluent. In that reservoir are tens of thousands of additional words reserved for the expert speaker that you, as an intermediate speaker, have much less practical use for than the initial 3,000.

Learning should continue past this point, but the diminishing value of the gains made can be demotivating and give students the feeling that they have indeed plateaued. The way in which to escape the plateau is to change your approach. The habit of commitment and practice must remain in place, but the resources you engage with may be the things you need to change once that feeling of plateau arrives. Constant and immediate feedback can come in the form of recording yourself speaking the language or making certain that whoever you are talking with feels comfortable and free to correct you as you go.

“The habit of commitment and practice must remain in place, but the resources you engage with may be the things you need to change once that feeling of plateau arrives.”

Focusing on your technique can mean assessing those resources you are engaging with and changing them regularly, keeping them fresh and not allowing your brain to switch on the autopilot it is so naturally inclined to do when consistently presented with the same overly familiar material. Lastly, constantly updating and aiming for specific goals, small and large, is a motivating factor that’s hard to beat.

The plateau is not our enemy — it’s a natural place to end up — but the key is to know how to recognise it and how to take advantage of it. Simply heading for the summit is often too imaginary to visualise the individual steps. But getting to the top of the next rock face is far more tangible and will give you the enthusiasm you need to carry on and enjoy that feeling of upward momentum all the time.