6 Strategies for Achieving and Maintaining a B2 to C2 Level of English

A lot of people get to an upper-intermediate B2 level in English – and then stop. There are reasons for this, but it is hard to continue making progress when your English is already good.

Here are three reasons why making extra progress is difficult – and some ideas for helping you to go from intermediate to advanced level.

Improvements are not always easy to see

When you first start learning English, everything you learn is new. If you study consistently, you’ll make progress very quickly.

But English isn’t like learning a software program. There aren’t endless new things to learn. For example, when you get to an upper-intermediate level, you’ve already learned most grammar rules. Instead, what you need to do is deepen and extend your knowledge and use of English grammar.

At an upper-intermediate level, it can be very difficult to see exactly where you’re making progress – and that can be demotivating. Why continue to study when you are always stuck at the same level?

But remember: you are making improvements (even small) that will help you on your journey to an advanced level. Here are some of the ways you can see your progress:

– a greater passive vocabulary (you can read and understand faster)
– more fluency (you don’t need to stop and think each time you say something)
– better listening skills (especially if you listen to English regularly)

Your English is already good enough for most situations

When you speak and write well enough (even with a few errors) you don’t feel you need to continue studying. You can communicate, and that’s good enough. Goal achieved.

But what happens, as a result, is that the mistakes you make become “fossilized”. That is – they solidify in your brain, making it harder to correct them.

I see this all the time in people who speak very good English. They make the same mistakes again and again.

Remember: when you know what your typical mistakes are, you can work on correcting them. At the intermediate level, you won’t have thousands of these, but correcting even a few will make an immediate difference to your English. Here are some things that you can probably focus on:

– Prepositions and verbs
– Gerund vs infinitive
– Simple vs continuous form

The Essential Grammar Rules You Need to Know for achieving
a B2 to C2 level of English.

Your vocabulary is limited or “stuck”

When you’re at an intermediate level, you can understand most things quite well – but you don’t use a range of expressions. Students often say:

“I always use the same words in English.”
“My vocabulary is stuck at a basic level.”

Does this sound like you? It’s perhaps the biggest thing that stops you from getting to advanced level. Your English conversations sound boring or limited (to you) and you can’t express yourself as precisely as you can in your first language.

It’s frustrating and demotivating, but there are things you can do. Read on for some ideas!

"Substantial Reading" and it's 7 Benefits For language Learners.

A direct path from intermediate to advanced level

The following ideas will help you get from intermediate to advanced – but you have to be strict with yourself. They all require effort, but if English is your goal, it won’t be too difficult!

Tip 1: Dedicate time consistently
10 minutes a day is good, though 20 minutes is better! Make it your best time of day as well, when you feel refreshed (just after you wake up) or relaxed (sitting in the park during your lunch break.)

Tip 2: Work on the mistakes
It’s worth investing 30 minutes or an hour of your time finding out what your mistakes are – and then trying to eliminate them one by one.

Tip 3: Use more native-speaker phrases and vocabulary
Reading helps you here – but make sure you also note down new words and phrases, and then find ways of using them.

For a quicker route to effortless conversations (where you don’t need to think and translate before you reply), learn “blocks” of English.

“Blocks” are entire phrases, collocations or phrasal verbs. The reason they’re useful is that you can “input” them into a conversation – and then just add the details for that conversation. They help you get more fluent (you don’t need to stop and translate) and more natural (they’re what native speakers actually say).

Tip 4: Follow someone you admire (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tic Toc, Youtube, etc)
Actor, personality, singer, entrepreneur… It doesn’t matter who the person is. But the benefit of following someone is that you hear their phrases and can copy their language style, accent or intonation. When you do this, you can be sure that your English will sound more native and more advanced!

Tip 5: Watch TV series, movies, and documentaries
Watching television series, movies and documentaries are one of the quickest, most enjoyable, and easiest ways to improve your level of English, especially vocabulary in context. Today we are so fortunate to have at-call television services such as Netflix, Prime, Disney, HBO, etc where we can constantly watch unlimited shows in English as a way to improve our overall skills. In addition, Youtube makes unlimited numbers and varieties of documentaries available for those who wish to improve their academic English.

Tip 6: Watch the world news
Either download apps to your smartphone, or enter the website of international news services such as CNN, BBC, Yahoo News etc and make time every day, say 30 minutes, to watch the videos of the events of the world. Watch a full variety so as to be exposed to a variety of different vocabulary and subjects. These apps and websites also have written articles that you can read as another alternative for learning English.

I hope that you found these strategies interesting and that they are able to help you to achieve your C2 level of English.

Good luck and good studying.