My English learning history

                                     

                                                                                     By Flávia Cristina de Souza

 

I can clearly remember the day of my first English class: I was about nine years old and I studied in a private school. One day our supervisor told us “you’re going to have English classes!!!”. At the time, it wasn’t as common for children to have English classes from the time they’re in kindergarten as it is in many schools today, so it was really new for me. That specific day I learned the English words for the basic colors.

 

   

 

At that time, in 1992, my younger sister had a T-shirt with the Beatles’ lyric , “Lucy in the sky of diamonds”, and I said “You know, if I take this T-shirt to my English teacher… I bet she can translate everything!” Now, thinking back on such a simple English phrase, it’s really funny!  (Listen to the song here).

 

Even though I remember that I was too excited about studying English, I can’t remember the specific details of any other early English class.

When I was eleven, I moved to another school and I used to study English from a book with a yellow cover (if I’m not wrong, this book is called “Practical English Course”) and I learned how to sing my first song in the English language, “Ten little Indian boys

 

 

When I was twelve, I became very interested in music. A large portion of my interest in learning English came from English songs, especially the ones from Alanis Morissete’s album “Jagged Little Pill”.

 

The song “Ironic” was one my favorites at that time. Actually, I used to know how to sing almost all of her songs by heart. It wasn’t so easy to get the lyrics because we had to buy magazines that used to publish this kind of stuff. Nowadays everybody can access Internet from everywhere, and there are lots of sites in which anyone can easily get many lyrics. 

 

Then I continued studying English at school, but it ended up being not that great because people didn’t have the same language level. Some students hated the English language while other students just loved it. Some thought it was impossible to learn, while others really wanted to learn yet they couldn’t afford an English course. Of course there were such good students just because they were pretty interested or because they were studying in a private language institute.

 

When I was sixteen, my mother asked me a question: “Flávia, what if you started studying English? I’ve got a proposal at my job in which every employee or their relatives can study English at Wizard Idiomas with a nice discount”, and I just answered “Yeah! It’s really nice.. Why not?”

 

 

Then I called there and did a placement test. I could have chosen between basic two or three, but I decided to start from the basic 2 because I preferred to repeat some subjects instead of missing some details I’ve already forgotten.

 

I studied at Wizard for 2 years. I remember that I was very excited about their method because I really thought I was learning the language. When I was studying the Present Perfect Tense, I decided to give up studying there because I was preparing for the entering exams for UFMG, and I imagined that studying just at the preparatory course for the vestibular was enough. The result was that I passed the UFMG entering exams, but my grade in the English test was awful: thirty marks in a hundred-mark test. At this point, I realized that I wasn’t that good in grammar as I imagined. Even with a terrible grade, I didn’t give up the idea of starting studying the first subject in English at UFMG “Integrated Skills I”, although it was recommend that people who had got less than 50 in the vestibular test should not enroll the subject. It wasn’t a difficult period, but I had to study a lot to have the same level as the other students used to have. I remember that I was afraid because I had heard about professors at UFMG… they talked just in English!!!!

 

After my third semester at UFMG, I started working as a monitor at the private language institute “Inglês & Cia Idiomas” where I am a teacher today.

 

 

At this moment, I’m about to graduate in Letters Course (English bachelor’s degree), and I intend to get a master’s degree on Applied Linguistics soon.

I’m sure learning is an endless process and I’ve been learning very much since I started teaching. I want to study more in order to get a certificate from Cambridge (CAE firstly, then CPE), and I intend to spend some time traveling (and studying as well) in Canada, London or EUA as soon as possible. To practice my English I like watching movies and listening to the radio bbc online.

 

 

A curiosity: when I was studying at Wizard, I imagined myself being an English teacher because I used to like my teachers and their classes a lot. However, after having my first class about the present perfect tense, I was sure that I would never be an English teacher because I put in my mind that I’d never learn that strange verb tense. After some time I was more confident about using the present perfect in my writings, but I just included it in my conversation when I started giving classes. “I teach the present perfect tense all the time, but why am I not confident about using it in my speech?” and then this problem was solved!

 

 

 

 

Now I know everything has changed in my life from the time my mother suggested me to start studying English. Thanks God she did it!

 

Click on the image above and watch

a wonderful video which I just love!