How to break out of a stubborn score on the CELPIP

Hi, I'm Aaron. Welcome to the Celpip Success Podcast.

This is the podcast where motivated English learners just like you learn how to speak English fearlessly and learn practical tips and strategies to conquer the CELPIP exam If I'm studying hard for the CELPIP, why do I keep getting sixes and sevens?

This question has come up in various ways and multiple times this week, in conversations that I've had with clients and in emails that I've gotten, so I thought I would share my answers with you. I've also talked about this before in previous episodes, so I'll link to it in my show notes today if you'd like to check it out.

But here's what I've been sharing with my clients, and I hope it helps you move forward too. The first thing to keep in mind is simply this. If you're stuck at six or seven on the celpip, it's not a fail.

Remember, the CELPIP isn't a pass or fail exam. If that 6 or 7 wasn't the number you wanted, I I know it's terribly frustrating and disappointing and discouraging and likely very depressing.

But you didn't fail. Persistent sixes or sevens means the CELPIP is trying to tell you something. It's saying you have an intermediate level of English.

It's really important to listen because it will likely keep telling you the same thing for a while no matter how many times you try and retake the exam. And that leads me to an important idea here. If you pay attention to it, it will save you buckets of money and frustration and stress.

The answer here is not to keep retaking the exam hoping for a better score. It's also not about studying harder because two CELLIP scores don't improve the more you study. So how do you bump your score up?

Improving your English skills in general is the way forward over time. Like think months and years of regular practice. Not oh my gosh, I'm taking the CELPIP in two weeks. How can I bump my score up from a 6 to an 8?

Or even to a 9? I know, on the number scale it looks quite simple. An 8 or a 9 is just two or three easy numbers away from 6.

Surely harder study will get me there, won't it? But in reality, a bump of a number or two in your CELPIP score can equal a year or more of daily work on your English skills.

Idea number three Here are five practical things that you can start doing today to start saying goodbye to your six or seven. Number one, Break out of your first language bubble. Have a look at what you do each day.

Are you surrounding yourself with your first language or English? Surrounding yourself with English is the first and most important step you can be taking and keep on taking.

The next idea I have for you is active engagement is the way forward. This is totally in your control, by the way, especially if you live in Canada already.

Look for opportunities to use your English because they won't come knocking at your door. You have to go to them. You need to make them happen. This means you need to be purposeful because it's not going to happen by chance.

And that can mean looking for and joining things happening in English all around you. Here are some examples. Your lunch breaks I mention this all the time. I talk about taking lunch breaks not alone. And I see you.

If you are a quiet, introverted kind of person, it's so easy to want to stay hiding in your office, isn't it? I know I do it a lot. I like to take my lunch, close my door, and just sit and eat alone.

Maybe listening to a podcast or watching something on YouTube while I eat. But you know what? That is the best way for you to not have those opportunities that you desperately need to use your English. Because you're hiding.

English is happening all around you and it's happening a lot at your lunch break.

Maybe this is your chance to take your lunch, go where other people who are speaking English are sitting and enjoying lunch together and see if you can join English in. But here's the next thing. Sitting with them. I know.

Especially if you are a introvert kind of a person, or shy or quiet, just getting out of your office and sitting around other native English speakers can be a huge step forward. And I get that. I totally see that for you if that is your situation, because I know what that feels like too.

It's a big step sometimes just to kind of include yourself in something that's going on already.

But if you've already done that, if you've moved out of your office and now you're sitting at that table with other people who are talking, maybe talking about the weekend, talking about a movie that they saw, maybe talking about something going on in your workplace, it's not enough just to be sitting there. Now it's your time to join in that conversation.

Maybe come with one thing already prepared in your head that you want to talk about and see if you can contribute. Look for it. Make it your goal that when you're having your lunch with your co workers that you are going to join in the conversation at least once.

The next idea I have for you is to look for clubs or special groups that are focused around an interest that you might be interested in too. These groups or clubs are probably hanging around in your community already.

And you can probably find a club around any kind of topic that you might find yourself interested in. I know around here in Victoria, there are hiking clubs, walking clubs, biking groups, board game clubs. Where do you find them?

Well, if you look in your local church, if you're nearby to a church, sometimes they post these clubs on the bulletin board. You can also go to your local public library or your community center.

Those are all great places for you to start looking for these groups where you can join in and start meeting other people. I have literally seen dozens of these kinds of clubs posted on the bulletin boards of our local library and in our local community center.

They are there. You just have to go look for them and try to join. Why is this so important, joining a group?

Well, if you don't have people you can use your English with, you need to go where they are. A group or a club is a powerful way to work on multiple needs at once, like building relationships.

You know, if you are trying to establish your life here in Canada and if you're listening to this podcast, that's probably you. You are a newcomer here in Canada and maybe you've been here for a while.

I was speaking with several people this week who have been here for a while, but their biggest issue is that they haven't been able to meet other people.

And I think that that is a big part of growing your language skills is connecting with other people in not official kind of settings, in fun, you know, recreational kind of situations where you'll be able to, you know, maybe not feel the same kind of pressure as you would at your workplace, for example. But yeah, building those relationships with people that are centered around activities that you already enjoy doing is a big thing to try and do.

And not only will this help you be connected to other people, it's also going to help you to fight loneliness if that's something that you are struggling with now that, you know, summer is sadly on the way out.

My poor wife is lamenting this already because for her, winter is the hardest time of the year because it gets so gray here in Victoria and on the west coast. I mean, it gets rainy and cold and just kind of miserable for many days in a row.

My wife would say for the next six months it's just going to be Gloomy and gray and cloudy outside kind of drains her life energy out of her because she's a Latino, she's from Mexico, she loves the sun, she loves hot, she loves the heat. But the cold, it's just not for her. And it. That kind of weather here in Canada, I think.

I think it adds to that sense of loneliness and isolation, if that's what you know, if you come from a warm climate where the sun is the norm, this time of year can be the hardest for you.

And I think that one thing that we have found that has helped us and that I think will help you as well, is leaning into relationships and friendships.

Because when you have people that you can spend time with, it just makes these, especially these colder, you know, less outdoorsy kind of days, a little bit more. A little bit easier to bear. So the first reason why I'm suggesting that you join these groups is, well, to be able to practice your English.

Especially if you don't have people around you that you can practice with, joining these groups will be able. Will open up the door for you to meet people who you can practice with.

The second reason why I'm recommending these groups is what I was just saying to help you to fight off loneliness and that sense of isolation that is so common when you are just trying to, you know, establish your life here in Canada. A newcomer, you don't know a lot of people. It's so easy to feel isolated. So building those relationships are vital.

And the next thing, the next reason why building those relationships are so important is so that you start to have fun.

I mean, if you're by yourself all the time, if you don't have people that you can interact with and enjoy, you know, your life with, it, it can feel, well, boring. And so if you connect with other people in these clubs, in these groups, you'll start to have more fun.

Especially if you can find a group that's centered around something that you enjoy doing, something that you love doing. I'll tell you, for me, one of my favorite things to do is to play board games.

And we have some friends that are experts at getting, you know, a group of people around. A lot of them come from our church. We sit down around the table on Thursday nights, usually. Sometimes on.

On the weekends, we just informally gather a. A group of people around. In our case, it happens to be Spanish speakers.

So this is a great opportunity for me to spot, to practice my Spanish skills while we play a board game. And for me, that's one of my fun things to do. I love playing board games.

And so getting together with friends to play games, it's, well, great for me because I'm having fun. That's the one benefit. But it's also a great benefit because I'm building my network of friends.

And number three, it's great for me because, well, I get to practice my Spanish because many of them are also, well they're, they're Spanish speakers and not also, but they are Spanish speakers and I am a Spanish learner. So it gives me the opportunity to use my Spanish and that's what I want for you.

Not that you would start using Spanish because maybe that is your first language, but that joining these groups gives you that opportunity in an informal, fun, relaxed way to practice your English skills. Consistently. Doing these things over time, over the coming weeks and months is the way that you will start to see your maybe stagnant CELPIP results.

Those sixes, those sevens, that's how you'll get those sixes and sevens to stop being sixes and sevens and climb up to an 8 or to a 9. So that's what I want to challenge you with today. Look for ways to connect with people.

Remember that your CELPIP scores aren't going to go up just because you study harder for the CELPIP exam. They go up when you start building your English skills over time.

You know, it's been a while since we last checked in on what you've been working on for your CELPIT prep. If you've never done this before, it's simple to start and powerful for your practice and hopefully for your self esteem too.

Why so powerful, you might be asking.

Well, I've noticed that when you're working on a long objective like learning English and in my case, building a business, it can easily feel like you're not making any progress at all. No matter how hard you've been working.

And even worse, instead of noticing what is going well, we all have a built in tendency to notice and be hyper aware of what is going wrong or the mistakes that we've committed. And when all we focus on are our mistakes and how we failed, well, it leaves us living in discouragement and pulls us towards giving up.

I know it does for me. So here's how to run the check in Number one, pull out your journal. If you don't have one, that's okay, you can start one.

Today's a great day for that. Number two, Divide your paper into three columns or headers. In your first column, write accomplishments.

Here's where you're going to jot down a few of the things that you tried with your English that worked this week. Nothing is too small and nothing is too big for you to write about here.

And you can also write about the things that didn't go well but that you learned something from. For me, that's an accomplishment. When you make a mistake and you learn from it.

You can write as little or as much as you like in each of these sections. By the way, there's no limits.

In your second column, write what I'm working on now in this section, take a few notes about what you're working on in your English right now. Like this week. In your third column, write what I'm going to try next next week. In other words, innovation.

This is where you're going to be challenging yourself to step out of your comfort zone.

What is one or two things you'll do differently or that are new to you, that will help you use your English skills in new and different and challenging ways? Write them here and then make sure what you write finds their way into what you're actually doing now in that middle column that we just wrote.

But make sure that arrives maybe next week. Think of it like you're creating next week's to do list and that's it, my friend.

Keeping track of these points can help you notice where you're making progress, what you're learning from mistakes, and what you're going to try next. It keeps momentum going and hopefully it will help you push back on discouragement when things don't go the way you want them to. Hey, guess what?

The premium version of this podcast is finally, finally here. A lot of you have been asking for it and I'm excited to finally make it available. So what is the premium podcast and why should you do it?

Well, it's a low cost, high impact way to dramatically improve your listening skills. For the celpip. I've seen students transform their scores just by using the type of practice you'll get in this new version of the podcast.

All it takes is the right kind of activities and consistent effort, and the premium podcast will help you with both of those things.

Here's a taste of what you'll get the complete show transcripts of every every podcast episode that I put out going forward so you can read along and improve your reading and listening skills at the same time.

You'll also get CELPIP focused worksheets to help you power up your listening skills, and you'll also get bonus audio segments that you won't find anywhere else ready to try it out for the entire month of September, you can get free access to the premium version, give it a listen and see the difference that it can make.

In today's Premium segment, I'm going to walk you through some of my experiments over the past week and what I've learned from it and why that matters to you and your CELPIP prep. Here's what I wrote in that journal that I was telling you about just a few seconds ago.

I wrote about a frustration point from what I tried this week.

I have been working hard to automate a few processes for my podcast, like finding a simpler way to get my transcript ready to be used here for my premium listeners right now, there's a lot. A lot of button pushing, downloading, editing and then re uploading going on. Lots of wasted time.

I thought I had figured out a clever workaround using a tool called Zapier, but sadly my podcast host doesn't seem to support what I'm trying to do, which is harvesting my transcript automatically when I publish a new episode. Having this happen would eliminate all those button pushing steps in uploading and downloading that I was just talking about.

To figure all this stuff out took me hours of experimentation and trial and error only to come up with an email reply from my podcast host saying that what I was trying to do was simply not possible at this time. Ugh. So frustrating. Hours of work down the drain or at least stalled or put on pause.

Now this might sound strange for you considering that you're working on your cell prep skills, but here's why I think it matters. This idea is also me. Like what I was just describing for you a moment ago was me stepping way out of my normal comfort zone.

It's scary to try and offer something new for you. You might like it. Yahoo. You might hate it. Oh no. And you might not even care. But I'm taking a step towards something new that I haven't done before.

I'm seeing it as an experiment. If nobody takes me up on it, then I'll know not to keep pushing this way.

The challenge for you what experiments are you running this week with your English that has you stepping outside of what you normally do? It might end up in you making a mistake and growing as a result.

And it might also end up in a failed experiment with your English, which will also lead to you growing as a result. But it also might end up with you making a massive step of progress because your experiment worked.

The truth is, you won't know until you actually Try now. Here's something that I'm working on now. Also something new and quite scary. A speaking skill sprint. And this is not another advert for it.

It's me talking to you through what I'm trying to do right now and where I see it taking me, or I hope it takes me. I am planning another experiment with this challenge, one that will drastically shift how I serve you and whoever decides to work with me.

I am going to go one step deeper, or at least I'm going to try to go one step deeper in who I serve and how I serve in the CELPIP Success School.

Instead of serving newcomers to Canada who need to get ready for the celpip, I'm now going to be redesigning myself and my services to focus on helping shy or introverted newcomers who want to speak fearlessly and confidently in the speaking section of the exam.

The other course content that I already have around listening, reading and writing will still be there, but my main focus will zero in on speaking skills and making it the most friendly learning experience on the planet for introverts. Because I am one and I know how scary this kind of thing can be.

What this might mean for you Well, I talk a lot about taking small steps to help you improve your skills in English, and I'm all for those, especially if you're just getting started and need to build momentum.

But I also am about taking bold steps that push you way out of your comfort zone, something that you need to do frequently if you want your skills in English and anything at all for that matter, to get better. My question and challenge for you this week is simply this.

Can you identify one big step out of your comfort zone in English that you can take this week? Write it down in your journal today and see if you can make it happen. All right.

To grab this week's show notes and transcript and listening comprehension worksheets, you can just go to celpipsuccess.com forward/premium podcast.

That's celpipsuccess.com premium podcast and you can download the show notes, the transcript, and the listening comprehension worksheets that will help you work on your listening skills for the celpip. Well, that's it for this week's episode, plus the premium bonus content. I hope that you've enjoyed it and that you'll return for the next episode.

Have a great week. Bye Bye.