- Nome: Francisco Antônio Xavier e Silva
Idade: 23 anos
Escolaridade: Superior Completo
Narrativa coletada por Vera Menezes em Julho/2004
My learning history started when I was about 6 years old and my mother started to expose me to songs by the Beatles, Queen and other American and British bands. At this point, my objective was to know how to "sing" the songs, not produce meaning from the words.
After I entered school, I had a teacher who had lived many years in England and had many friends. This teacher was responsable for teaching my first steps towards the proficiency of the language. His classes consisted mostly of pictures drawn in black and white and the students were supposed to color the pictures and learn the new vocabulary. Grammar was not very much used at this point, we would only learn how to speak the
language.
In 1989, after 2 years attending this teacher's classes, I entered CCAA, which uses the audio-lingual method, so my studies of the language were mostly concerned with learning fixed phrases and grammar structures and with plenty of repetition. This method had been very rewarding for me, because I have a good memory, so the vocabulary and structure were easily assimilated. My studies, however, went way beyond the English classes, I would talk to my mother only in English and she used to subscribe the Speak-up magazine for me. I read the magazine and learned to sing and understand the
songs.
In 1995, I had already a great desire to visit the United States and to become a native-like speaker. After talking to my mother very much about it, I finally convinced her to send me to the States as an Exchange student. At first, she wanted to send me there when I was 18 years old, but I was so insistent that she send me before that. My experience in the States was very different, because I stayed in a countryside city with a very formal way of speaking, structurally correct at least, and this family helped me a lot during the year I stayed there, they were from a different religion than I was, so I was exposed to a very different social and cultural context.
After I came back from the States I finishd my course at CCAA, took a teachers' course there and was hired by the school to teach basic levels.
The same year I started teaching, I entered Language College. At this point, I had a mania, which later became a obsession of reading dictionaries, which I still do. I also continued listening to British songs, because I had gotten sick of
Americans.
In the year 2002, I started to take a course at Cultura Inglesa to apply for the Cambridge University Proficiency Exam. At Cultura Inglesa, I had a more general approach to the English Language, which concerned all types of discourse, formal, informal, spoken, written and today I like watching cartoons, sitcoms and with my own students in the classroom, my classes have always extrapolated from the teachers' book and I continue learning today by attending seminars, talking to native speakers and giving classes, which I plan to continue doing, for I love it and I plan to develop it even more up to my
PhD.
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