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Date Posted: 14:16:15 06/24/03 Tue
Author: Alexandre Righi
Subject: My Task # 8

My experience on learning English is not completed of course. But so far it’s been great. I became really interested in English around 1990, when I was 13 yrs old. You can blame it all on videogames. Yes I like videogames a lot, and when I did not understand a word I’d look it up in a dictionary. So it began with lexical activities. When I was able to understand complete sentences, I felt like producing them. I remember reading many things in English: from shampoos labels to whole books. I have over twenty relatives living in the US nowadays, and they’d send me many things: books, magazines, candies etc. It sure has motivated me, being curious the way I am, to understand whatever was written on these things. A great jump in my English as second language came in ’97, when I went to the US for the first time. I remember that in four months I was fluent. That was my goal when I went there, I was not ashamed that I never had the chance of speaking English in Brazil, but the place I was, and the context were different: I had to talk to communicate, whether at home or at work, English was the only way out. Now I’m in college trying to get my diploma and working with English a lot. I sure can speak the language, read it and write informal subjects, but when it comes down to a paper or an essay, so help me God. Returning to the task, in my childhood I could not afford an English course, and opportunities of speaking it were scarce, I was only able to get real communication when I was abroad. Comparing these skills that I learnt to those developed by the communicative approach, I’d say that I studied for four months in California in an adult English school. It was meant to teach English to people coming from around the world. It was full of meaningful activities that demanded us students the act of speech to communicate in class. It gave a boost in all aspects of the English back then, I just wish I could have studied more at that time.

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