Nome: Mylene Fonseca Garcia
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: 10 anos
I have been studying English as a second language as far as my fifth grade as part of a standard high school curriculum until my entrance exam and as a ICBEU’s private student for two years and a half. But this ended a couple of years ago, just after I got my proficiency certificate from Michigan in 2001/2002. Since then, I’ve studied both English and Portuguese literature and language. Well, I guess that my English language learning covers around ten years of practice. During the time which I was not studying English, I really noticed that my cinema sessions and also some popular shows on television helped me a lot to keep tracking of linguistic features and even of native speakers’ slang.
When I was younger I was able to dedicate myself more in English learning than I do today. It is probably because I had fewer obligations and more free time. But I remember myself keeping a glossary of unknown words, which I always looked up in the dictionary. I was used to rewrite it until I had memorized every word and its meaning. I still believe that this is an effective practice because it reinforces the meaning of a unknown word in two ways. First during your “trip” to the hard cover English/English dictionary (I prefer this king of consulting dictionary. It was not like that when I was a beginner but now I feel comfortable using it), and second, when you rewrite it until you know it by heart. Undoubtedly, it is most probable that, in some time in the future, you will forget what you have learned if it you had not practiced it, but I also use another hint: I do create sentences with the unknown word and its possible meanings. By contextualizating this new vocabulary inputs, I find it more effective that just memorizing isolated words. Well, this activity could be considered as an applied communicative application of a CLT course.
Another very related action to this is my practice of reading authentic English language material. Again, I was accustomed to read magazines such as Time Magazine and Newsweek, but now I only read articles from the similar publications on internet. Yet, it is authentic contextualized material from which I usually gain more knowledge of the English language. This is an important component of communicative approach as it deals with authenticity, correctness and appropriacy of English language.
I also remember that as a language student I had to fill the blanks which I abhorred. Opposing to this, I really liked when any composition were asked from us although I sometimes got a little haste in it. At ICBEU, we usually have the brainstorming activity and the following stage where the students interact with each others and the teacher. I recall a specific class where we were the participants of a minor crimes trial. This was very interesting because we learned some specific related words to the subject (convicted, guilty, not guilty, overruled, sustained, barrister (UK)/attorney (US), etc) and we had to make a performance to the class using them. This example is also related to the idea of a CLT class where the learners are faced with real life situations.
Finally, within my learner experience, I have practiced some structural approach as audio-lingual classes and, more recently, some of the principles of communicative approach. I do feel that each person as a language learner should be responsible for his/her own language acquisition and s/he should use any method with which s/he does feel comfortable, reasonably if it is really an effective
one.