Nome: Daniela Elisa Duarte Ferreira
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não informado

My experience as a leaner of English is not very long though its the influence it has had on my teaching practice has been tough. I started studying English somewhere back in elementary school, in the 6th year, I guess. At that time, I lived in a small city in the northeast of Minas Gerais and all my teachers happened to be some of my relatives, neighbors or my parents’ friends. There was only one English teacher for all the groups, and he was my mother’s brother. I can’t remember much from those English classes, but there were sort of based on the grammar-translation method, as the classes were taught in Portuguese and we were asked to translate and learn by heart lists of words in order to prepare for tests. I remember that the class was arranged in the traditional way and the teacher tried to teach us a lot of grammar rules, however, I can’t remember whether I learned anything about the language during those years. Nevertheless, that was probably when I started building my beliefs about unsuccessful language classes... 

When I turned 15, my family decided to move to Belo Horizonte, where I studied my first and second years of high school and I also started studying English in a language institute. At school, things didn’t changed much from my elementary-class experience. A grammar-translation book guided our classes, which were taught in Portuguese and completely teacher-centered. Although I believe that my English high-school teacher had had a broader education than my uncle’s, classes continued to be the same, focusing on texts’ translations and also on lots of grammar exercises, though I can’t remember if they taught me more than the verb to be. On the other hand, in the language institute classes happened to be more modernized. My memories don’t able me to state whether those classes followed all communicative approach’s principles or not, but they were very close to it. Classes were taught in English and they used a very good book, named Headway. It was a modern book, and the four language skills were developed. The class was arranged in a semi-circle, but unhappily I can’t say if we used to do group or pair work. Anyhow, I believe that I didn’t dedicated much of myself to this course, therefore I didn’t help me developing my English skills very much. I believe that the fact that I was a teenager, just arrived in town and with all those new things happening, my motivation turned the opposite way from English classes. 

However, my language studies went the other way around when took off on an exchange program to Denmark. During this experience, English meant to me more than a school subject or a boring course that I had to attend. It became what it really is: a language for communication. As most of the people I spent the year with couldn’t speak Portuguese, and when I first arrived Danish wasn’t familiar to me, I needed English in order to do a very basic thing: express myself. During the exchange program I didn’t have any kind of formal instruction in English, however, everyone there has English as L2 and I also had contact with other exchange students who has it as L1. I believe that what happened to me there is something that we try to do with our students in class: I learned it because I needed it (in a real context) and we try to make our students need some word/structure through simulating in class real-life situations. Apart from improving my English skills, I also had the chance to learn a third language, which is Denmark’s first spoken-tongue: Danish. When I first arrived there, I couldn’t say “yes” or “no” in their language. I had a little formal instruction, but as I was totally immersed in their culture and I also had contact with the language everyday, I quitted the language course and started learning it in the most “communicative” way possible: by communicating. After 6 months I was fluent in the language, but reading/writing skills weren’t much developed, and nowadays I barely can read/write in Danish. 

Back in Brazil, the experience abroad made me interested in taking language studies further, and I finally applied for the Letras vestibular in 1999. My experience with the language in the under-graduation’s been very different from any of the others I’d had, mainly because at college I’ve learned about English teaching, instead of learning the language. Since August 2000 I’ve worked as an English teacher in a private language institute, and in August 2001 I started working as a trainee at Cenex.

My undergoing practice as a pre-service teacher has proved me we all acquire more than just the language through all the years we spend observing our teachers (Lortie, 1975 apud Johnson, 1994). Beliefs that I’ve constructed towards what is a good teaching and a bad teaching, what helps learning or what isn’t good for students, what is a good teaching/learning environment, etc, influence most of what I do in classroom. I’ve realized that despite all the academic studying on language teaching theories and teaching and learning processes, most of what I choose to do in class is because I believe it’s correct, and it sometimes might not be what’s the best for my students. It’s like a cycle, I tend to do in class, as Nespor (1987) argues, what I believe helped me when I as a student. Although I’ve been almost 4 years studying language teaching and the Communicative Approach, and all the language institutes I’ve worked in apply the communicative approach in their classes, I’m aware that I often do things because I believe they are correct, not because there’s a based-knowledge or scientific research beyond my attitudes (Nespor, 1987). However, I’ve been working on reflective tools, such as journals and class observation (Gebhard & Oprandy, 2000), that can help me towards a better practicing, which is: teaching my students on the best way for them, not on the way I learned best. 

References: 

GEBHARD, Jerry G., OPRANDY, Robert. Language Teaching Awareness – A guide to exploring beliefs and practices. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 
JOHNSON, Karen E. “The Emerging Beliefs and Instructional Practices of Preservice English as a Second Language Teachers”. In: Teaching & Teacher Education, Vol. 10, No 4, pp. 439-452, 1994. 
NESPOR, J. “The roles of beliefs in the practice of teaching”. In: American Educational Research Journal, 26, 160-189.