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Date Posted: 13:47:34 06/25/03 Wed
Author: Érika Amâncio Caetano
Subject: task 8

TASK 8
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.
My learning history is not very interesting. First of all, most of what I know today concerning with English I learned by myself. I stayed in English schools for a little more than three years. The point is that I’ve always liked English a lot. I’ve never been abroad, for financial reasons. In the English schools I studied, what really helped me were the role- plays. We used to create a kind of theater for each kind of peculiar situation, such as: being in a restaurant, asking for directions, in an airport and others. When I studied by myself, my focus was on vocabulary; I always read a lot and did lots of grammar exercises. By watching those cable tv series, I could improve collocations and idiomatic expressions a lot, as well as pronunciation. This way, when I was 16, I took a test to check my level at ICBEU and I started studying there on Intermediate 4 level. After this level, I was supposed to start the preparatory course for Michigan Proficiency Exam, but I had no money to go on. Then, after two years, I started studying Letras and also to work. I saved some money for a while and took the FCE Exam in 2001. Right after I knew I had passed, I saved some more money and took a six-month preparatory course for CAE at Cultura Inglesa. I took the exam last December and fortunately, I passed. It was a “dream come true”, as everything in my life, because I’ve always worked very hard to achieve what I want.

2) Analyze your learning history according to the communicative principles and tell us if there were some of its characteristics in your learning experience.
I studied English in four different courses. Three of them are very well-known and the other one is downtown, cheap and apparently not very nice. However, the latter was the best English course for me, because my teachers knew exactly on which level I was, as well as the points in which I was better or worse. I had a lot of Communication practice and I must say it was where I most learned, because I was supposed to talk all the time and it was not random talk: it involved a lot of real life situations, picture analysis, picture comparison, role-plays, focus on communication. I studied there more than ten years ago, but I must say that they had this idea of Communicative Approach very well developed in their program. Two of the others had very “mechanical” classes, with a moment for listening, another moment for grammar and the last one dedicated to a methodic process of drilling. Teachers spoke all the time, there were no new activities and almost all the classes concerned with grammar. It seems that they were afraid of doing something more daring, something new, because they were traditional and had a good number of enrolled students. Cultura Inglesa was the last place I studied English, but I didn’t really studied English there, I studied how to take the test, although I learned countless vocabulary. Their method is associated with Communicative Approach, because classes are dynamic, full of new activities and there is plenty of motivation and autonomy for students to talk about several topics. The teacher guided us through an activity and we followed her path.

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