Language Experience
1. Write about your past formal or informal language learning experiences. Would you consider them effective or ineffective?
Learning foreign languages is a real challenge to everyone and a lot of people have their own successful and unsuccessful experiences. As for me, I’d like to tell about a negative one because, unfortunately, I had it more than positive.
I’ve been learning English since I was 10 years old. At first, it was at school. Those lessons left much to be desired. We had a middle-aged teacher who used to have favourite students and showed her attitude, inhibitions cast aside. We didn’t have speaking tasks at all. She gave us different texts and we read, translated and learnt them by heart. Sometimes we even didn’t understand what we were speaking about which made it more difficult to answer. She didn’t use any communicative approaches. What is more, we weren’t interested and motivated. At the age of 15 I nearly decided to give up learning it.
Needless to say, it was a real shock to everyone when I announced my decision to enter Pedagogical University, the department of foreign languages. I was sure that I would learn it there. I had a private teacher to prepare for entrance exams. At that time I thought she gave me a lot knowledge, but being a teacher now I can judge those lessons as a waste of time and money. Frankly speaking, it was self-studying. I was given 5 unites of grammar to do at home. Nobody explained any rules to me and we just checked exercises.
Fortunately, at university I had a lot of different teachers. Some of them tried to use communicative tasks, such as role plays. But it was still academic studying. Teachers didn’t need to motivate us as we all wanted to pass exams and get a diploma.
However ridiculous it may seem, I learnt English at work, being teacher is the best way to study. If I need to know something, I try to teach my students and after preparations for lessons and loads of explanations to them I get to know a lot. So
Learning foreign languages is a real challenge to everyone and a lot of people have their own successful and unsuccessful experiences. As for me, I’d like to tell about a negative one because, unfortunately, I had it more than positive.
I’ve been learning English since I was 10 years old. At first, it was at school. Those lessons left much to be desired. We had a middle-aged teacher who used to have favourite students and showed her attitude, inhibitions cast aside. We didn’t have speaking tasks at all. She gave us different texts and we read, translated and learnt them by heart. Sometimes we even didn’t understand what we were speaking about which made it more difficult to answer. She didn’t use any communicative approaches. What is more, we weren’t interested and motivated. At the age of 15 I nearly decided to give up learning it.
Needless to say, it was a real shock to everyone when I announced my decision to enter Pedagogical University, the department of foreign languages. I was sure that I would learn it there. I had a private teacher to prepare for entrance exams. At that time I thought she gave me a lot knowledge, but being a teacher now I can judge those lessons as a waste of time and money. Frankly speaking, it was self-studying. I was given 5 unites of grammar to do at home. Nobody explained any rules to me and we just checked exercises.
Fortunately, at university I had a lot of different teachers. Some of them tried to use communicative tasks, such as role plays. But it was still academic studying. Teachers didn’t need to motivate us as we all wanted to pass exams and get a diploma.
However ridiculous it may seem, I learnt English at work, being teacher is the best way to study. If I need to know something, I try to teach my students and after preparations for lessons and loads of explanations to them I get to know a lot. So