I remember that I had my first English learning experience when I was ten. I had a very active teacher who planned games and songs for every class. We almost never used the classroom to learn; we used to go to the park to run and play while we sing very nice songs in English. I did not have neither exams nor quizzes, I did not have an English book and I never were assigned any homework. I remember one of the exercises developed into the classroom: I was told to write a story in Spanish but including some words in English. It was really confusing. In that moment, I loved my teacher, I really enjoyed my classes and English was my favourite subject but, nowadays, I realized that I did not learn too much.
Fortunately, I received really meaningful input thanks to my family. One of my aunts is an important English teacher and one of my uncles has lived in the United Sates for more than 25 years. When I was a child, I used to listen carefully to the conversations in English they had each time my uncle visited Colombia. For me, it was a wonderful experience and one day, I wanted to speak like them. That was one of the reasons why I decided to learn English. My aunt used to teach me songs in English and sometimes she spoke in English to me. When I started High School, I already had certain vocabulary.
During my two first years at High School, I made a lot of handcraft in the English classes, I made posters, cards, boxes and calendars. The classroom was really beautiful, it has a TV but we did not use it. I enjoyed a lot looking out through the window because there were a lot of trees and plants outside. My teacher was really nice, especially with because I was the best student. I did not have exams and normally the homework consisted of elaborating a card or aposter in English. More than the content, she used to evaluate how beautiful the assignment was. In that moment, we started developing an English project calles “ autobiography”. I had to write about many different topics and organize a folder. The teacher corrected mistakes and then we wrote about a different topic. I remember that on one of the papers I described my house and my school to practice “there is / there are” and I wrote a letter to a dead relative to practice “past simple”.
I consider that I learned English seriously when I was in eightth grade; the classes were simply amazing. First of all, I had an excellent teacher with a high level of English and a very good pronunciation. She got her degree at UIS. During the lessons, she used worksheets, posters, videos and group work. She gave clear explanations and she motivated us to do research about the topics. We did a lot of role plays and oral presentations in which we had to characterized famous characters. Once, I dressed like “Maria Felix” and did a presentation about her life using past simple. I will never forget that.
We continued developing the writing project and, in this course, I did have quizes and exams and a lot of homework. Thanks to my teacher and those activities I improved considerably my English.
They are the most prominent experiences duirng High School. Here I have to mention that I got a very good score in English for the ICFES exam, thanks to my teachers, all of them were women.
When I started University I already had certain knowledge of English so I did not have problems to understand instructions during the classes and to develop the activities. Fortunately, I had an excellent teacher who made me feel sure that I had chosen what I wanted to be in my life and I started loving English even more that before. Her classes were really interesting, I never felt bored because she used to plan many different activities for each class. We did a lot of practice and she used to develop all the skills during the lessons. We had to practice a lot at home and she was constantly motivating us to learn something useful for life: English. For me, my first contact with English at the university was awesome.
During the next levels, I continued practicing what I had learnt but some classes were a complete waste of time. I decided to study by myself. I considered that those teacher did not have a clear methodology to follow so they were experimenting different strategies and they never used different resources from the English book. When I took advanced English things chaged because I has a demanding professor who taught me a lot. We used many different materials: internet, interesting debates, book reviews, movies, litening activities different from those included in the English book. That was a very nice experience. And of course that learning process has not stopded because I am still learning many things every day.
