How to track an English student's vocabulary progress

An English student who is truly improving uses new words they were not using three months ago. This is the most visible and most defensible form of progress in private language lessons. It is not a subjective feeling, it does not depend on a placement test, and the student recognizes it the moment you show it to them.

The problem is that tracking an English student's vocabulary progress honestly is one of the hardest tasks for an independent teacher. Nobody has time to list out every single word from every lesson in a spreadsheet, and a teacher's memory distorts how much each student actually speaks.

Why active vocabulary is the indicator that matters

There is a big difference between passive vocabulary (words the student recognizes when reading or listening) and active vocabulary (words the student actually uses when speaking). What proves progress in conversation is the active kind.

A student who watches series in English builds passive vocabulary fast. A student doing Duolingo builds recognition. But to speak fluently, they need to pull the right word at the right moment, with no pause to translate. That repertoire only grows with spoken practice, and the only way to measure it is by recording and counting what the student actually said.

This is the indicator that gives your student a concrete answer to the question "am I improving?". And it is what justifies the price of your private lesson against a Cambly or Preply subscription.

How most teachers try to do it today

The most common solution is to keep a spreadsheet per student with the words "covered" in each session. It works until the third student. After that, the spreadsheet becomes a graveyard of words nobody reviews, and most of the words logged are vocabulary the teacher introduced, not vocabulary the student used.

Other common attempts:

• A list in Notion or Google Docs per student, updated by hand after the lesson;
• Anki with manual cards for each new word;
• WhatsApp with a voice message summarizing the lesson;
• Notes in the student's physical notebook.

They all share the same problem. The person classifying what counts as a "new word" is the teacher, from memory, usually right after an exhausting lesson. And none of them separates what the student used from what the student heard.

The result is that, three months later, the teacher cannot show concrete evidence of progress. And the student renews their monthly plan out of goodwill, not because of data.

What a serious vocabulary tracking system would need

Thinking about what a good system would need to deliver to solve this problem without becoming yet another manual task for the teacher, the list is short:

• Separate the teacher's speech from the student's speech (transcription per participant, not merged);
• Count the unique words the student actually said, lesson by lesson;
• Accumulate that vocabulary over time, with no copying and pasting required;
• Show when the student used a new word for the first time;
• Work without the teacher having to remember to "turn on" anything during the lesson.

That last point is what breaks down most in practice. Any system that depends on the teacher remembering to hit record, tag a word, or classify manually will fail within the first few weeks. Vocabulary tracking only works if it is automatic.

How Noladi does it

Every lesson taught in Noladi's live class is processed by the post-class pipeline automatically. The transcription is done per participant separately, so what the student said stays distinct from what you said.

On top of that transcription, Noladi generates statistics per lesson and per student, including the count of unique words used. Lesson by lesson, that accumulated repertoire keeps growing, and it is recorded in the student's dashboard and in your teacher dashboard.

You do not need to configure anything per lesson. There is no "enable analysis" button, no spreadsheet to update. The lesson happens in the live class, and a few minutes later the dashboard shows how many unique words the student used, how long they spoke, and how that number compares to previous lessons.

Get to know Noladi

If you teach private English lessons, or any other language, and want real data on your student's progress instead of a forgotten spreadsheet, it is worth creating a free Noladi account and running a test lesson. The first hour of live class is on the house, with no card required when you create your account.

See how it works at noladi.app/teacher.