Nome: Marcos da Silva Manso 
Idade: 43
Escolaridade: Superior completo
Tempo de aprendizagem: Impossível dizer


This faculty of committing ideas, impressions, events, emotions, and background information from a recent or distant past to memory has always shown itself tenuous in my life experience. While some people, such as most of my brothers and sisters, do little effort to remember those moments experienced in life as early as, say, three or four year old, all my struggles trying to recall those bygone years result in fragmented, dispersed, faint chunks of memory. A few of these fragments however, were somehow trapped into my memory bank and they are accountable for preserving the identity of near-lost past. Perhaps, a big portion of those episodes may not be entirely lost, but merely allocated in different sectors of my brain’s “hard disk” which is hard to access. Who knows if they will reappear memorably someday anytime in the future?

My “relationship” with the English language may have began inside an unspecified classroom at an unremembered public school at a country town which insisted not to be called so. There were no impacts, traumas, or ecstasies in these initial contacts. Besides that, my fair grades (or fairly good ones) have never ever deigned to be known as memorable. Later, this relationship started to present stronger and distinct interconnections when one of my brothers migrated to Uncle Sam’s land in pursuit of the American dream. Since then, perhaps my first flirting winks towards that remote land and language were flung. My interest grew stronger, my dreams and plans began to shape in the mind, and the contact with that tongue was intensified. Amongst those ceaseless comings and goings of my brother, my marriage union to the English language was finally sealed when I pulled up stakes to the States, the land of the green currency, a land of hopes of better days to come in contrast with those years lived at my birthplace, full of green, but short of hopes.

When or where did the tryst ever take place? When or how did the first caresses to that puzzling language ever happened? It may be that it has never occurred. Or it might be something like a forged marriage for a noble cause. One way or another, this intimate interlace lasted for six years. In fact, it may have endured for four or fewer years, if some gipsy years of migration from Portuguese to “Portunhol” (“Portunish” = something between Portuguese and Spanish; an attempt usually by Brazilians to speak Spanish by relying on their knowledge and association of Portuguese and Spanish), from “Portunhol” to Spanish (I learned Spanish in my first year in America for everyone at work spoke Spanish and we only spoke English to customers), and from Spanish to English (sadly, when I became a little fluent in Spanish I changed my job and never spoke Spanish again) are deducted from that sum amidst lots of “vice-versas”, more “vices” than verses. Once some very low financial independence was conquered, which later proved to be self-deceptive (or would it be ‘deception’?), divorce was something inevitable and it eventually came about though without disputes or resentment, without bitterness or wounds. 

Going back to the genesis of my contact to the language at the Brazilian public school and my first steps into the learning process, I must admit it was not a state-of-the-art approach which was current those days. Lots of drilling and memorization were the common procedure then. No wonder most pupils hated those classes, were traumatized by them, or had barriers built within them. I did not hate the language nor did I fall in love with it. My real contact with the language was in the US and it was really hard at the beginning. Driven by necessity, a few, loosen words and expressions were pronounced at waiting lines. While trying to figure out what the wall menu at the fast food restaurant (my best option at that time) meant, other customers took my place time and time again. For a while you had to repeat your previous choice of serving till you learned other items from the menu. Lots of self-study sessions helped to commit some structures to memory in order to cope with every day struggle. 

At New York’s high school I guess I had the opportunity to see the first traces of something close to the Communicative Approach techniques and activities and improve my functional competence in English. We had then some pair-work and group activities though nothing much that would amaze or wonder you. I believe the method or approach used was something in between the Structural Method to the Communicative Approach. I think what counted most was the constant exposure to the target language; one thing helped the other, i.e., you learned things in class that you soon were hearing or practicing on the streets; and you came to understand things in classroom you had heard outside it. The problem with people who live in a foreign country and do not attend a school is that they may develop some phonological competence once they can recognize and produce the distinctive meaningful sounds of that language, but they will not develop their orthographic or grammatical competence much for they will not be able to decipher and write the writing system of that language, unless they indulge in some hard self-study and spend lots of time doing so. I think very few people are able to do it, mostly because it can get very boring. In fact, those who do attend a good ESL course, for instance, do their homework, and engage in extra, interesting ESL activities are the ones who really improve fast in communicative competence. Unfortunately, because my work hours were crazy and I could not attend regularly a school I had to rely on my own studying most of the time in order achieve some sort of formal learning which was habitually in a form of a book and a pencil. Apart from that, informally I learned English through television and radio programs, talking to natives and foreigners, at restaurants, cafes, night clubs, on the streets, in some of my workplaces, newspapers and magazines, and so on. Getting the meaning from the context was a constant practice. And this is the “com.text” of my learning history. Whatever is not so clear because of “detextualized’ memory I hope you get it from the context.