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Date Posted: 16:38:17 06/27/03 Fri
Author: Ronaldo GM Rosa
Subject: Task8/learning experience

EIGHTH CLASS June 23rd to 27th

THE CLASSROOM

YOUR TASK IS:

1) Write a narrative telling us your learning history. Include your classroom experiences and all the actions you performed in different contexts in order to learn English.

2. Analyze you learning history according to the communicative principles and tell us if there were some of its characteristics in your learning experience.

The following site can help you with the competences developed by the communicative approach:

http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/LANGUAGELEARNING/OtherResources/GudlnsFrALnggAndCltrLrnngPrgrm/PragmaticAspectsOfCommunicativ.htm


My learning experience


I began to study English when I was about 12 years old, in the old '5a série'. Until then, my interest in English was merely 'platonic', listening to songs that I enjoyed for its musical beauty and sonority, without understanding anything.

When I start studying English in the school, it was because the obligatoriness of the course. But I was soon interested in the language. The classes were not oriented by the communicative approach; they were a lot of drills and tasks - take-home, in class, on the blackboard - but I confess that I liked it a lot.

Approximately in the same period, I was deepening my interest in rock and pop music. I spent a lot of time of my adolescence (and also later) listening to songs, reading the lyrics and trying to understand and translate them. These habits helped me improve my English.

All the time I studied English at school ('1o and 2o graus') teaching was very traditional: a series of tasks and exercises, most of them written, with very little conversation. As I was always involved in reading lyrics and poetry, writing, listening and trying to sing and play songs, I went developing some skills in English, although speaking remained less improved. I think that my 'communicative competence' is not very good.

I passed some years without studying English formally, till I started to attend some classes of a course in my job, and later I was beginning my course of Letters at UFMG. At FALE, I was introduced to other ways of studying English, with emphasis on audio-visual, conversations and so on. And lots of literary and academic texts, of course, which is also good.

And I keep on studying my English...

In recent years, I have been sometimes exposed to what appears to be 'communicative' classes. But occasionally they were so confusing and so 'pseudo-communicative' that they simply became a chaotic loss of time. But in other circumstances, when classes are managed with seriousness and competence, and when my idiosyncrasies accept them well, communicative methods are really productive.


Ronaldo G.M. Rosa
June 27, 2003

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