Nome: Ana Regina F. de Araújo
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não informado
I was fifteen when my parents suggested that I should start taking an English Course. This was much of my elder brother’s influence (who is two years older), once he himself had started at this age. As he had learned the language real fast, two years later he was invited to start teaching English for the same school – CCAA, at that time called Centro Cultural Anglo Americano.
So, there I was, having my brother as my first English teacher, which was already a pressure for me, once he was really demanding, both as a teacher and as a brother-teacher.
I used to say that the method applied in that school was somewhat like a brainwash . We were trained to repeat and memorize finished structures a thousand times without thinking about them . Nor were they connected to our current activities and never were we asked to express our opinions and use the language on our own.
The class would start with the presentation of a dialogue. The first presentation contained directed visual exploitation, followed by explanation of new contextualized structures and vocabulary. Portuguese was never allowed and perfect pronunciation and sentence structure were regarded essencial. Notice that the dialogue lines were recorded and we should repeat the lines right after having listened to them .
On a second presentation, all students were asked to repeat each line individually. Therefore, if there were 21 students in the group (that was the maximum number of students allowed in a group) there would be 21 individual repetitions. After all repetitions had been done, the teacher would ask objective questions for each line, directing them to individual students.
On the third or fourth class, the teacher could turn off the slide projector and ask direct questions about the dialogue. Then there was the listening of it having the books open followed by individual reading, playing the role of characters. At last, self correcting exercises were assigned on the students workbook.
There was no relation of structures and vocabulary to the students’ real lives. English was an “alien” in our lives.
As a student, all that was asked was understanding and memorizing what had been taught.
Of course that was only the beginning of my learning experience which had guided me up to low intermediate level.
The second phase of my learninng experience was much more interesting.
As an exchange student, and still following my brother’s path, I went to the United States to live there for a year.
Due to the way I had learned the basic English structures, I felt insecure and didn’t know how to utter my own sentences in English. I had been trained to repeat dialogues which weren’t part of my life. This way I would remain quiet at first when I had to face free conversation and interact with others in English.
In the U.S. I was forced to express myself but still it was hard . Besides I couldn’t trust what I had learned for it sounded like fiction to me, also feeling that my speaking skill in English was insufficient.
Actually, I believe that I only really learned the language when I came back and started teaching (fourth and everlasting phase). It had forced me to study, research, understand and use the language appropriately and fearless (although I still make mistakes and question my knowledge).
When I crosscheck my acquisition of English with the communicative principles, I think I can say that the method applied by the school, through which I had my first contact with the language, had provided me with grammatical and lexical competence, including pronunciation, intonation and ortography aspects but, regarding functional and discourse competence in its pragmatic aspects, it was really totally inexistent. And that was why it had been so difficult for me to be set in interactional situations which demands total dominion of the pragmatic aspects (functions, variations, interactional skills and cultural framework) of the communicative
competence.