Nome: Maria Isabel de Avila Martins
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não informado


Self motivated! That's how I can describe my relation towards english-learning. When I was 11, I was given the opportunity to learn english, as well as my brother and sister, at a conceited school in Belo Horizonte. I used to have classes three times a week and I always enjoyed being there. The whole atmosphere of the english course was very exciting to me. 
At 15, I joined a group of students and teachers and headed up to California for a month-course at the University of Redlands. This experience made me feel more interested in english than ever.
On the other hand, my sister and brother stopped the course every now and then, not giving and end to it.
After I graduated from my english course, I enrolled myself in an exchange student program and went to live in the US for six months. When I returned, I started teaching at the same english school I had studied before.
Thus, my learning and teaching experience was pretty much the same. At that time, audio-lingual method was the most of it.
A regular class would start with a warm-up. The teacher would ask questions on the student's every day life and then he would change that answer into the new structure to be taught. Then the teacher wrote that new sentence on the board and he would make the new structure presentation. After that, practicing the new structure with questions and answers would take some time until all the students have retained it.
In a second step, the teacher turned on the slide projector to introduce the new dialogue. He would explore the most of it, visually saying, conducting students to infer the idea of the sentence. The teacher then said the line and the there would be chorus and individual repetition. Whenever the teacher reached the sentence with the new structure the teacher would turn the projector off and started drilling it. After that there was a transpositiion to the "real life".
When the dialogue finished, the teacher read it all through, and then the students were asked to role-play the dialogue and extrapolate it to real life situations. The teacher then would explore the book until the end of the unit and ask the students to do the excercises.
Of course it is completely different from nowadays's used methods, once grammar is not exposed the way I described above. And that's my difficulty! I still have the necessity of grammar explanation beforehand, writing it and practicing it before, even though I have done other teacher's training courses along the way.
While studying the communicative approach, I have been trying to take the most of it to overcome my difficulty in grammar teaching. I know I can learn a lot from that!