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Date Posted: 07:58:24 06/27/03 Fri
Author: Clarice Goulart de Oliveira Costa
Subject: Task 8

My English learning background

I started learning English at the age of 8. Since I was a child I was fascinated about English and felt a great pleasure in studying it. During all my English lifetime I studied at an English private school, which is the place where I work nowadays as an English teacher. Before starting my Letters course, I think I had never thought about my learning process - methods, approaches - as deeply as I have been doing latety, especially after taking this subject.As any other ordinary English course,we used to use two books - textbook and workbook. The former would be always used in class - lots of repetitions, pairwork and grammar explanation; whereas the latter would be assigned as homework and would be corrected in class. As I always studied at the same school, I cannot compare it with other schools, as being good or bad. I believe that it was a very nice course and that a great percentage of what I know up to now is due to it. However, after having contact with different people who studied in different schools and professors and theories about learning processes and approaches, I was able to realize that I could have had contact with some learning strategies and techniques that might have helped me in my learning process. Having the communicative approach in mind, I do not think that my course was communicative enough.It lacked more interaction, functional language, role-playings and dynamism.Its focus was more on grammar and correct structures. Furthermore, the only real-life contact I had with the English language (I mean, in terms of living abroad) was when I was an exchange student in the Slovak Republic for a year. Even though it is not an English-speaking country, I had the opportunity to practice and improve it a lot due to American and Australian foreigners whom I met there, to English classes which I took there and also and especially to the situation I was passing through - I did not know their language and had to communicate with any person in English. I can assure that this experience was of great importance to my learning process, since I had to "find my way out" through English. Moreover, having become an English teacher, all the experiences I had can enable me to have a more critical and broader view about not only teaching but also learning. I always try to see myself as a teacher through the eyes of a student - what is ok or what can be improved. After every class I teach, I ask myself whether I would like it or not, if I were a student there.
All in all, I can say that a learning method or approach will always be of some importance and validity according to the learner`s needs and the way it is approached.

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