Nome: Ana Paula Menezes Lima
Idade: 23 anos
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não informado
First of all I am not sure if that is what the teacher really wants us to do.
Anyway, here I go:
Throughout my English learning history – and I shall say it is like a love history – I have been exposed to all types of experience. It began tem years ago, when I was thirteen. During the first years I took private classes in my own house, because I have two English teachers in my family ( I had classes with both in alternate times). At that time they were not very experienced with the teaching task, but they did their best for me to learn English.
In these first years the learning process was not very communicative. I remember using dialogues, however that was just a repetition exercise. (Reflecting on those years I conclude that is not very easy to be communicative when you have basic students. I am not saying I agree with this “repetition strategies”, but I see some difficult points in dealing with communication and basic students. That is why I am here taking this course!).
The next years I was still taking classes with my first teachers but this time we had more people in class, so it was much nicer than before. As I believe in the learning process, not only the student, but the teacher learns something, my teachers also developed their and as a result the classes became really interactive and interesting. At this period, the use of communicative competence (sociolinguistic, cultural, interactional and functional) became an active part of our learning process. My teachers were more concerned about teaching only grammar and we did a lot of interesting activities, such as role plays and writing short stories for our classmates to read. The interaction brought the attention of the students to the class, (or at least it brought mine!). When I came to UFMG I realized that my English was not so good as I imagined, so I had to do an effort to improve it. I took extra classes in Cenex and that was a fantastic experience. My teacher lead the class in a very communicative way, always concerned with our acquisition. Also, I took English classes inside graduation and some of them helped me a lot. I remember one of the classes in which we had to write an short story and give to a classmate to do peer editing. As I love to write I dedicated myself on the project. Another nice activity was the oral presentation I had to do in my Oral skills class. Everybody in class was involved with this project because we had the opportunity to show our colleagues something we considered interesting. As a complement I read everything I can find in English, watch cable TV, listen to music. All these efforts are to improve my language skills, because I believe also that we never stop learning things.
Analyzing my learning process I can say that in the first years I did not have a communicative teaching. But after a while, my classes became as interactive as they could be. All the types of competence were developed in my case (sociolinguistic, interactional, functional and cultural). Specially cultural was very important, because as the text we were supposed to read to help us says: “It is impossible to speak Korean or Japanese correctly without understanding the social structure of the respective societies”, however situations like this happens all the time in the English learning process, some people are not in touch with the culture and this makes the learning much more difficult. In my case I was lucky to find teachers concerned with the cultural aspects, because I had not the opportunity to live abroad yet, and we all know that living abroad is one of the best was to develop our cultural knowledge.
Thus, the use of the communicative competence makes all the difference between the real English speakers and those who can only repeat a few sentences like the book is on the table.