Layla joined Grace Academy in February 2024 with a solid B1 foundation and a goal that most people would have called ambitious: reach C2 within a year. Eleven months later, she passed the CPE exam with a grade A.
We sat down with Layla to understand what really drove her progress.
"The biggest shift for me was stopping to treat English as a subject and starting to treat it as a tool," she told us. "I stopped studying vocabulary lists and started reading books I actually wanted to read — in English."
Her daily routine was deceptively simple: 30 minutes of reading every morning, one episode of an English podcast during her commute, and a weekly one-on-one session with her Grace Academy coach where she was pushed to argue, debate, and think critically — not just speak correctly.
"My coach never let me get away with vague answers. If I said 'it's complicated,' she'd ask me to explain exactly why. That precision is what took me from B2 to C1 to C2."
For students aiming for rapid progress, Layla's advice is direct: "Stop waiting until you feel ready. You learn the language by using it, not by studying about it."