Nome: Roberta V. Mesquita
Idade: 27
Escolaridade: superior incompleto - Letras
Tempo de aprendizagem: 24 anos


I started learning English at a very early age. My aunt had just arrived from leaving in London for over 10 years, was leaving with us and talked to me in English only in a way to practice her English and teach me some. I was about 3 years old at that time. So, by the time I was old enough to go to an English school, I was way ahead of all the other kids my age and was placed in a teen/Intermediate class at Yazigi. I hated it at first, because I was eight and all the kids were over thirteen and kept teasing me! I tried to quit, but my mother would let me. 

At Yazigi they employed the communicative approach. The classes were not teacher centered and, even though we did some written exercises, we were never told: “Now let’s work with the Present Continuous…” or anything like that. After a few years there and the adolescent crisis of a fourteen year old kicked in, I decided I wanted to go to the English School that all of my friends were going and I switched to Greenwich School in Sao Bento. 

I was quite shocked and frightened at first because they employed a grammar focused approach and the first time I heard someone say “Now let’s work with the Present Continuous…” I freaked out. I had no idea what the teacher was talking about. But, once she gave us a fill in the blanks exercise I was like “Oh, this is the Present Continuous. I can do this!” The transition from one approach to the other was a little confusing but I got used to it soon enough. 

I was always very fluent and had a large vocabulary compared to the other kids at my level. Not only had I started learning very early, but I was always very interested in music and at that time there was no MTV in Brasil, but, my father had business in the US and had to go there so often that he ended up getting an apartment. Therefore, he was always bringing me back tapes from the American MTV, which I watched one right after the other every day. I ended up memorizing most of them and I repeated the lines along with the hosts. My mother thought I was going crazy, but that trained my ears and improved my fluency. That led my right into conversation classes at Greenwich, only a year after I had switched there. I had a wonderful teacher who was a native from NY and I learned so much from him that English became a passion to me and I decided that I would pursue this passion into a career.

As I mentioned before, my father had business in the US and he went there every-other-month for 15-20 days, and he worked it out in a way that whenever I was on vacation he had to be there so my mother and I could come along. When I had just turned sweet sixteen, we were up there and we heard about a boarding school. It had been a dream of my father that one of his children would be a boarding student so, he offered me to study there for a year. I ended up staying for four and graduated from High School there. 

After graduation I went to NYU for a semester and studied Cross-Cultural Communication but I figured that my time away was on the verge of an end. So, I took a Vestibular for Letras at UFMG during a winter break from school and made my decision to quit NYU and come home as soon as I heard I had passed. And here I am!!