Nome: Ione Mendes
Idade: não informado
Escolariade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não informado

I started learning English 8 years ago in a Public School of Belo Horizonte. At first I did not appreciate the English language at all. The English classes meant for me only one extra class in which I had to bring an English dictionary. I thought that doing those terrible translations of texts were not a very interesting task. It was always the same, over and over. The classes were always following the same routine: we had a text, its translation, and questionnaires, whose answers you had to copy from the text. The classes were totally influenced by behaviorist methods. The activities were totally controlled by the teacher, who spoke only Portuguese in it. We also had memorization methods; we received some verb lists and we had to memorize them. Only at the third year studying English I started perceiving it differently. My new English teacher, Salatiel Ramos, was one of the responsible for this change. He had a different method of learning. He always said that to learn the English language it was necessary only time and will for learning more. He motivated us with songs and with interesting/funny activities. Instead of the dictionaries he taught us how to discover the meaning of the words by the context. In reason to this I thought I was learning much more than before. At that time my Portuguese teacher, Rose Ramos (Salatiel´s wife), started calling our attention to “Vestibular” exams. She advised us to study hard in order to be successful in the tests. From that time on I had an extra interest in learning English, so I started dedicating much more time to it. God blessed me and I was approved to study “Letras” here at UFMG. During the course I suffered a lot. I was desperate, especially in the beginning when I noticed that all teachers were talking in English all the time. I perceived that my knowledge, concerning to English language, was not sufficient to follow the classes. Then I started studying at the CENEX course, what helped me a lot. I think I delayed too much to discover my strategies of learning. Besides the disciplines that were related to this topic (development of strategies in learning) were kept to the end of the course. Some teachers only gave us some clues at the very end of the course and due to this I had the impression that the course were not so profitable as it were supposed to be. That´s all!