I’m sure you’ve all heard how watching films and TV series can help you improve your general English – and hopefully you’ve resorted to this method yourself. But has it occurred to you that watching vids can be a great tool to boost your Aviation English as well?
Previously we covered the steps to be taken along the way from zero to the proficiency test and I asked you to find out where you are at right now. That would be your starting point.
You know now where you are and where you need to be. So let’s then think of the best way to get there. Actually, there is no such thing as the ultimate solution: it will be the suited and optimized for you, considering your personal demands and resources you can currently invest.
In the previous chapter of this blog we dealt with ICAO requirements for the six descriptors and answered the question if it makes sense to study Aviation English ‘from scratch’ (spoiler alert: no).
Luckily, ICAO has defined the requirements for candidates at each level. Thus you can clearly picture the final result you should achieve. And the scary global goal of ‘mastering English’ boils down to clear, understandable and absolutely achievable tasks.
Are you a pilot or a traffic controller? Active or going through training to become one? Sure as hell the challenge of taking an ICAO language proficiency test is imminent. And it doesn’t really matter whether you have just been granted a private pilot license or a seasoned TRE with thousands of flight hours in the logbook.
Whether at an airline interview, or an ICAO English test, you’re likely to be asked this several times throughout your pilot career. Many pilots actually dread this question, they simply don’t know what to say.
