Nome: Tito Matias
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não informado
I started studying English when I was seventeen years old. Therefore, I have been studying English for six years old. I first studied English at a Language Institute which used its own material. Such a material had been produced by the school’s coordinator and it was composed by grammar topics and exercises related to such contents. I used to have a one hour class and those classes were given partly in English and most of the time in Portuguese as the objective of them was just to get through grammar devices of English language. Also, the classroom itself was crowded with about thirty to forty students and all of us sat down in rows as state school pupils. So, it would be very difficult to my teacher to enable all students to speak. For that matter, the teacher talking time was too much. I barely learnt English at that school because there was no emphasis on communication and the teacher herself would only focus her classes on the textbook. The following year I began to study at UFMG and heard about CENEX. After getting some information about the English course, I decided to study there. I studied there for two years and after that I started teaching there. My teachers were totally different from my past English teachers from my former school. They made us sat down in circles and would never be the head of the class or the center of the class. In addition, we were not allowed to use our mother language in class and the target language was the one used by them and the one teachers tried to make students apply in simple and meaningful conversation such as either borrowing things from each other or greeting at the beginning of each class and carrying on such conversations. The textbook was one developed by a British editor. Classes were always held in English and songs as well as videos were applied to help English learning. In conclusion, I believe that my first English classes helped me to acquire the grammar basis I posses nowadays but did not give me the chance to improve my oral abilities. Such an opportunity was given to me when I got to know the communicative approach.