MY EXPERIENCE WITH ENGLISH

Good morning everyone!🙋

In this post, I am going to talk about my relationship with the English language throughout my life. First of all, I have to say I was 14 years old (more or less) when I began to keen on learning English.

In Primary School, English was the subject I hated the most. I don’t know if that was because I wasn’t able learn a new language or because the teachers didn’t know the way to motivate their students to learn or be keen on studying this subject. Their methodology  wasn´t good to the extent that I only have two good memories from this period of my life (related to the English classes):

One the one hand, the first good memory about this period is a song which I listened when I was in preschool. This song is about the alphabet and it was sung by a bear who was called Teddy. With this song I learnt all the alphabet in English and I still remember the music of this song.

I am going to put here a similar song.⇩

On the other hand, it was a teacher who was called Paulino. I remember him with great affection because he spent a lot of his free-time giving us some extra lessons due to the bad level of students (like me). In these extra lessons, he helped us to improve our English in order not to fail our English exams.

In High School, I started to study the grammatical structures of English and work the listening skill. At the same time, I started to see how some people I know went abroad to study English in something like Summers Camps, so I decided to do some research in case there were some grants so I could go there too. However, we were feeling the effects of the crisis so the Government removed all the grants of this type. Another option was to go abroad without any scholarship, but these classes were and are very expensive. For this reason, I chose to talk with my parents and ask them to sign me up for classes in an English academy in order to improve my speaking skill (this skill is never taught in by the Schools and I considered and consider that it is a basic skill to have a good English language level).

When I finished High School, I managed to improve my spoken English, but I knew that I needed to go abroad to find out if I was able to communicate in a real situation.

Later, I started University and, by chance, I saw a poster announcing a grant from the Xunta of Galicia in order to improve some languages in their country, but the requirement was to have completed 60 credits of the some degree.

The next year, I completed all the application forms and in summer I went to Chichester (a village in the South of England) for three weeks.

There, I didn’t really learn all that I had to learn because there were a lot of Spanish people (in my class there were 15 students and 13 were Spanish) but it was a good experience and I improved my listening skill and the pronunciation (a bit).  Despite not having learned a lot, I think that it was good because it was a motivation to keep improving my English.

In short, I consider the methods of teaching of English language at schools have not been the appropriate ones until today. Because of this, I think it is necessary to be very up-to-date in this field in order to teach lessons and I am sure that if you motivate students with the suitable materials, everyone can learn a new language unawares.

Hereunder, I am going to put some links with some grants which can be useful for you:

• Grant to learn English in Madrid      
• Grant to learn other language in their country
• Grant to practice English as a teacher