Nome: GRASIELA IZAGA
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de  aprendizagem: não informado


1. I started learning English when I was very young. I think I was 6 or 7 years old. I remember my father went to England and stayed there for three months studying English. When he was back, he started teaching us (my sister and me) words and some simple sentences like: give me water please. I remember we came to memorize over a thousand words. My mother sometimes made quizzes with us giving lollypops as prize for the one that knew all the words she asked us. She used to give us the word in Portuguese and we had to say it in English. I remember we had fun with this. Then at the age of 8 I was put in an English class with an American teacher named Henry that passed lots of time teaching the wright pronunciation of words like: world and three. At that time we live in a little town. Then we moved to Rio de Janeiro and my parents put me in Cultura Inglesa. I had a hard time there because there was too much grammar structures and I was supposed to study a lot which I didn't do. I hated the course and my classmates. I think I was the worse student of my class and the teacher used to look at me with a sympathetic expression but she wouldn't do anything. At the end of the year I was going to repeat the course because my grades were very bad. Then my mother said to me: this is an expensive course and we are able to maintain only one of you ( me or my sister) studying. If you fail I will not keep you there. I was so afraid of that, which I studied a lot. A cousin recorded the lesson for me and I listened to them a hundred times. I did the final test and almost took 10 in it. I think that was the time when , as Vera Menezes says in her text (Fractal Model), the organizing of chaos happened in my mind. After that experience English became something fun for things and me to study again were a lot easier from that time on. At the age of 12 the whole family went to Bolivia where I studied in a Canadian school where we had English classes every day. Each class was divided in three levels at the time of the English class and I was in the advanced one. I had no fun studying because the classes were based on the grammar and we had to memorize lots of unusual words. From all that I only remember a verb: to corroborate. When I got back to Brazil I studied in Number One were we used to do lots of drills and controlled activities using diapositives to tell stories and then change them a bit. The time I was there I felt my English improved a lot. I stayed there for two years. Then I stopped studying English. My maintenance of the language was done through music and movies. I made some trips abroad when I had to use English and that is all. 

Analyzing my learning history I think at the beginning there was a lot of input given by my parents but there was no interest in contextualizing it. Those were isolated words. Then the class I had emphasized pronunciation more than anything else. Accuracy was more important than fluency. At Cultura Inglesa the method was pure grammar with no effective communication, there was no contextualization and the teacher used to talk a lot more than the students do. The classes in the Canadian school were the behaviorist model. Teacher knows student listen and learn. We could never use the native language (Spanish at that time). In Number One I had lots of drills, memorization of structured-based dialogs, language listening and the sequence of units were determined by principals of linguistic complexities never by content or function. I think that during my learning I had no moments of communicative teaching. However I got to learn but until now I feel afraid of making mistakes when I am talking. I think that if I had had more communicative teaching I Would certainly feel freer to express myself.