You come back in September feeling you have lost everything you had built. You open an exercise and it is hard. The conclusion writes itself: “I have forgotten my English, I need to start from scratch.” It is the wrong conclusion, and an expensive one: it sends you back over weeks of material you never actually lost.
What deteriorates in two months is more specific and less visible than “your English”: the speed at which you retrieve it, the reflexes of the exam format, and your stamina. None of the three comes back by revising theory.
What survives a summer without English
Research on second-language attrition points in a direction that surprises anyone who returns in a panic: after a break of a few months, the drop is a good deal smaller than the learner feels, and what drops is not what they think.
The grammar you understood in June you still understand. If you could tell “I have lived” from “I lived” in June, you can today, given a moment to think. Structural knowledge is the most stable thing you have.
Reading comprehension does not go either. A Reading Part 5 text you understood three months ago, you understand now. What you may notice is that it takes longer and your attention drifts sooner, which is a different problem.
And the vocabulary you recognised, you still recognise. Seeing “reluctant” in a sentence, you know what it means. What fails is the reverse direction: the word coming to you when you need it.
In your head: “I have forgotten everything” → the freeze when the first exercise opens
In the exam: “I know it, but it takes me a while” ✓ / “I don’t know it” ✗
Typical mistake: confusing slowness with forgetting, and treating it with theory instead of practice
One more thing worth knowing: relearning something you once knew costs far less than learning it the first time. The second pass is fast. That is why, for most people, the return plan should not take three months: three well-ordered weeks are usually enough.
What you did lose, and why a single exercise won’t show it
Three things genuinely deteriorate in two months, and they share one feature: none of them shows up in an exercise done calmly on the sofa. They show up against the clock.
Vocabulary retrieval. Recognising a word and producing it are two different operations, and the second one rusts first. In June you wrote “take advantage of” without thinking; today you know it exists, you understand it when you read it, and in the Writing what comes out is “use the opportunity”. You have not forgotten it. The path to it has become slow. In the exam, that costs marks in Open Cloze, in Word Formation, in the Key Word Transformations and in Writing: the parts where you have to produce, not recognise.
Format reflexes. In June, in a Key Word Transformation, you counted the words without noticing and knew that “despite” takes “-ing”. In September you are reading the instructions again. That is not English, it is procedure, and procedure is what goes fastest and comes back fastest: two or three sessions of real format restore most of it.
Stamina. A full Reading and Use of English is 75 minutes of sustained attention. After a summer, around minute forty you start re-reading sentences. In a mock you would see it as a drop in the final parts; in a single exercise you never see it at all.
In your head: “I’ll go through the grammar book from unit 1”
In the exam: “I’ll do one timed task and look at where I fail” ✓ / “I’ll study theory until I feel confident” ✗
Typical mistake: spending the first two weeks on what you already know, because it is comfortable
Check it in twenty minutes, without a placement test
You do not need a placement test to know where you stand. A placement test measures what is still intact, your knowledge, and hands you a reassuring number that says nothing about what you lost. What you need to measure is production and speed, and that takes real tasks and a clock.
Eight minutes: one complete Open Cloze. Eight gaps, no options. Cambridge does not allocate time per part, but eight minutes is what you can give it in the exam without stealing from the others. Look at two things when you finish: how many gaps you left blank and how many you filled with a word that “sounds right” but is not. Blanks are slow retrieval; sound-alike errors are lost reflexes. If you want the format in detail, the Open Cloze guide takes it apart gap by gap.
Eight minutes: the six Key Word Transformations of one Part 4. This is where procedure shows. If you go over five words, if you change the key word, if you lose the original meaning, that is not an English problem. The task protocol has gone to sleep. The Part 4 guide has the whole protocol.
Four minutes: sixty words by hand. Not a Writing, a probe: one paragraph of opinion on any topic, no dictionary, no crossing out. Read it afterwards and underline every place where you knew a better word existed and it did not come. That underlining is your work list for week one: it is vocabulary you own and cannot reach.
Those twenty minutes tell you three things no placement test does: how much production you lost, how many reflexes, and in which parts. And they tell you what to leave alone: everything you solved correctly and fast.
Three weeks to get your rhythm back, in this order
The order matters more than the hours. The temptation is to start with what feels safe, theory, and leave what feels frightening, the clock, for the end. It is exactly the other way round.
Week 1: retrieval, not revision
The goal of the first week is to reopen paths, not to learn anything new. Every day, one short timed production task: an Open Cloze, or six transformations, or a Word Formation. Twenty minutes. Then ten minutes with the mistakes, which is where the real work is.
The key is how you work the mistake. Do not look at the answer and move on. Cover it, try to produce it yourself, and only then check. Pulling a word out of your own memory fixes it far more than reading it; reading only recognises it, and recognition is what you never lost. This difference, between re-reading and retrieving, is the most important one in the whole plan.
Reading Part 5 and Listening move to the background this week; they do not disappear. One short listening every other day is enough to keep your ear in. What you have not lost does not yet need the time that what you have lost does.
Week 2: production and full format
Now the Writing comes in, which is where slow vocabulary retrieval costs the most. Two texts this week, each with the time it gets in the exam: the Writing paper is two tasks in 80 minutes, so about 40 per text, split into five to plan, thirty to write and five to check. In the check, the same operation as in week 1: every place where a better word was missing, note it and retrieve it the next day, do not read it.
Add one complete part of Reading and Use of English every other day, timed. Not to measure comprehension, but to rebuild the procedure of each part: what you do first, how long you give each one, at what point you move on even if you have not finished.
Situation: In week 2 you do a Reading Part 6 without a clock and get it all right, but timed you miss three.
✗ “I need more reading comprehension” — you have the comprehension; what is missing is deciding under time
✓ “I’ll always do Part 6 timed and fix when I leave a gap and move on” — you train the decision, which is what you lost
Situation: Your September Writings are correct but poorer than your June ones.
✗ “I’ll memorise lists of linkers and advanced vocabulary” — that is vocabulary you already have; reading it in a list does not activate it
✓ “I’ll rewrite each text once, forcing in the words I underlined” — you recover your own instead of piling up more
Week 3: stamina and one full mock
The third week has a single goal: lasting the distance. Do one entire Reading and Use of English in one sitting, the full 75 minutes, no breaks. When you finish, look at the score by part in the order you did them. If the last two fall relative to the first ones, the problem is stamina, and it trains like everything else: with long sessions, not with more isolated exercises.
Close the week with a complete mock exam. Not for a score, but to see in which part of the exam your concentration goes and how much time you have to spare or lack in each. That is the information you plan the remaining weeks with, and for that you already have the guide to how long you need.
How to know you are back
You are back when the Open Cloze comes out in exam time with the same number right as in June, when in the transformations you no longer count words because they count themselves, and when you finish a full Reading without re-reading sentences in the last part. In our experience, for most people it happens between the second and third week, and almost always sooner than they expected. You will not notice it as “I have revised everything”, but as answers starting to come out by themselves again.
If you prepare with lingaly, there is no placement test when you return: your first real sessions act as the diagnosis, and what has lost speed enters your plan before what is still intact.
Frequently asked questions
What if I am still slow after three weeks?
Then the break is no longer what is failing, and it is worth looking at which specific part resists. If it is Open Cloze gaps, it is almost always a family of structures you did not fully control in June either: prepositions, linkers, phrasal verbs. If it is the Writing, it is usually vocabulary that was never fully yours, only familiar. In both cases the work changes: it stops being retrieval and becomes learning, and that is when stopping on the specific competency pays off.
What is a placement test good for, then?
For deciding which exam to sit, not for deciding where to restart. A placement test tells you whether you are at B2 or C1; it does not tell you what rusted over the summer, because it measures recognition and what rusted is production. If you already know your exam, skip it and use the twenty minutes of real tasks.
Where do I start if I only have four weeks until the exam?
With timed production, from day one: Open Cloze, transformations, Word Formation and one Writing a week. Leave the long Reading and the Listening for the second week, because you have not lost them. And keep the last week for a full mock and for stamina, which is what shows most in a one-sitting exam.
Is it better to revise grammar before doing exercises again?
It is the most comfortable option and the least useful. The grammar you understood you have not forgotten, so revising it gives you confidence but not marks. What gives marks is retrieving what you have under time. If a task throws up a structure you genuinely do not control, then yes: go to that specific competency, for instance in Mastery, and come back to the exercise.
Conclusion
Coming back after the summer is not starting from scratch, and treating it that way is September’s most expensive mistake. What you lost is speed, procedure and stamina, not knowledge. Measure it in twenty minutes with real tasks and a clock, work for three weeks in that order, and keep theory for the structures an exercise proves you do not control. The second time round, you learn far faster than the first. Use that.