Universidade
Federal de Minas Gerais
My
multimedia narrative
Luciana
Andrade Silva Fonseca
Computer
Assisted Language Learning – 2005/2
It wasn’t until 10 that I
started going to English classes. According to a teacher at the school I used
to go to when I was
I had to be fully literate
before studying any other languages, and this would happen at the age of 10.
Today I ask myself: where did
she get that idea from?!
When I finally completed 10
years of age, in 1989, I was ready to go to English classes, I had become a woman!
My mother picked the school, CCAA, 
and no sooner she had picked it, I started attending
classes. I must admit I was quite excited to start learning English, since my
parents used to speak it at the table during the meals when they didn’t want us
to understand what they were talking about. It worked very well; I couldn’t
make out a word of what was being said. It sounded so Alien
to me!
My first day at CCAA was so
exciting! I couldn’t get enough of those slide shows and the sound following
the pictures being projected on the wall which told a story – or at least I couldn’t
get enough of those for the first our!
And we had to repeat
!
I was just very glad I could
understand that the name of that boy on the wall was Bob and that he was
pleased to meet Mary, who was also on the wall.
The method being used was the
audio-visual method and
CCAA was one of the top schools back in
In 1990, because of my
father’s work at Pitágoras, we had to
move. We went to a city called Tucuruí, in Pará…
…and I went on with my studies
to try to learn the language that sounded exactly like Alien to me one day. I
didn’t attend any private courses in Tucuruí, since the only place teaching
English was Pitágoras. I used to be the top student – I’m guessing here I was
the only one, since the rest of the class used the time to chat, play around
and catch up on what they were behind. But not me, I did all my homework and I
followed the teacher’s every instruction, I had a blast!
In 1992 we moved again. This
time we went to Teofilândia, in Bahia.
I bet you had never heard of
this city, had you? It was quite an interesting little town. There were only
four thousand people living in there, but, believe me, there was a Cultura Inglesa!
And that’s where I went to
keep on studying English. I still remember the oral tests and the plays the
students put on, and although I feared the oral tests to death, the plays were
all right! Cultura Inglesa had (and has) always tried to keep up to date as far
as its teaching methodology go, and I can still remember their genuine concern
with classroom realia.
I had a great time during the three years I studied there, after that we had to
move again.
In
1995, we headed for Coqueiral de
Aracruz, Espírito Santo.
The city was similar to a
condo, near a city called Aracruz. And
in order to keep studying English, I was enrolled at Number One.
My two best friends and I
used to walk to Number One twice a week and sometimes, doing that was more fun
than actually studying, although I enjoyed the classes at Number One.
I still remember how the
books used to be, these tiny little books created
by Number One, with no colored pictures, or no color at all.
I clearly recall three of the teachers I had at Number
One. One of them was a biker, a female biker.
She used to come from another
city, riding her motorbike with plastic bags tied around her boots so that the
rain wouldn’t spoil them – I really didn’t see the point in that, since the
boots were actually horrible plastic rain boots. She came into the class, sat
down on the floor and 
we stayed there too, for over
an hour. One day I asked her what now
here meant - it was written nowhere
(now here, according to myself) – and
she said she didn’t know. After about five whole minutes studying the word, she
finally said it wasn’t now here, it
was no where. I had never felt so
guilty in my life, as she kept going on about how we should not tell anyone
about her mistake; otherwise we would have to deal with her. Angry woman!
It was the last time I had a
class with her.
Our second teacher was a man.
He wasn’t our teacher for a long time, but I remember one day I got the courage
to come up to him and ask him a question after class – I was only a teenager
and I was completely embarrassed to have to deal with the opposite sex. He
taught me ‘head
over heels’. I will never forget it, as this was the only thing I remember
having learnt from him.
The third teacher I had was a
chubby young woman in her twenties. She had just come back from the States and
I idolized her for that.
She was happy and polite and
she assigned what today I considered the most fun task I have ever done for English
class. It was for an exhibition at the end of the year and we were supposed to
put on a play and perform a song for our audience. The play was recorded. It
was Romeo
and Juliet.
Romeo was a surfer and Juliet
was deaf. The audience was made up of two friends and I, since we didn’t have
enough people to fill up the theater. We had to be shot from up close;
otherwise it would be much more evident there were only three people watching
the play – although being shot from very close didn’t make much of a
difference! There were five people in total in our group, two of them were at
the stage and the other three were the audience. We had such a fantastic time!!
The song we had to perform was “Only
You” by The
Platters.
We did it with little red
hearts taped onto our butts and when the song went:
Only you and you alone
can thrill me like you do
and fill my heart with love for only you
We turned our backs and
showed the people our butts with little red hearts written ‘you’ on them. It
was such a nice performance.
I left Number One after three
years when we had to move again. This time we came back to Belo Horizonte, and
I went back to Cultura Inglesa – to
which I had to walk and really hated it - , then back to Number One and then to
ICBEU.
I think ICBEU was my
favorite, although all the schools I had been to seemed quite similar. I had
this American teacher at ICBEU who spoke very little Portuguese. She was an
old, but very nice, lady that used to walk to ICBEU every day. She was quite
fit and I used to see her striding along the streets with her backpack, her
t-shirt and her bermudas on. It was quite a funny sight! Nice lady!
After ICBEU, I traveled to England. This was in 1998, and I stayed
there until 1999, for a year. I went to
I lived in York, a 2,000 year-old city, a two-hour
train ride from
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Going
out! At a
pub near my house At
work
I came back to
We are in 2005 and it has
been sixteen years I have been studying English. Although it has been that
long, the feeling I have is that the more I learn, the more I have to learn and
I completely agree with that. The theory is that our knowledge can be
represented by a circle, where the inside represents what we know and the
outside represents what we don’t know. The more we learn, the more this circle
grows, the bigger it is the contact we have with what we don’t know.
So I guess I will be studying
English forever and I am delighted to know that for every new thing I learn,
there will be thousands of other things I will yet have to learn. This way I’ll
keep growing and I’ll never get tired of a language that once sounded Alien,
but that today sounds like music to my ears!
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