Nome: José Miguel Teixeira de Carvalho
Idade: não informado
Escolaridade: não informado
Tempo de aprendizagem: não informado

As far as I can remember my first contact with the English language was provided by my mother, back in the early 80's. In those days she used to walk me to my swimming classes every monday, wednesday and friday. Since I didn´t like to learn how to swim, she had this strategie to distract me while we walked to the club. It consisted in asking me to repeat the numbers from 1 to 10 in english. Typical kind of easy exercise present in everybody's early days of learning english. I must say that today I know how to perform a countdown and the 100m crawl.

However, it wasn't untill the year of 1986, when I was in the old fifth grade, that I had my first contact with english in a systematic way. And the english-present-in-the-brazilian-public-school-system has been the only kind of english that I have heard of. I have no certificate of proficiency (never applyed to a test), no experience abroad, have never payed for any kind of english course, have no contact with native speakers (apart from professor Kevin J. Keys, with whom I speak most of the time in portuguese, cause he's my neighboor, and it's no more than a "bom dia, como vai?" conversation).

So, concerning my classroom experiences the only thing I can say is that my classmates use to cheat from me in the tests. Honestly, I don't understand how can students find a hard task to study (i.e. to memorize) the few simple situations that appears in public-school english classes. But they did (and they do) and, because I didn't, I used to help those who were my friends in the tests. So much for classroom experiences, hmm?

Concerning the actions I like to perform in order to improve my english skills, here they are:
- watch over and over again films that pleases me;
- watch over and over "The Simpsons, The Monty Python Flying Circus" among others;
- talk to myself and to a close circle of friends who can speak the english language;
- do lots of reading, but only of matters appealing to me;
- try to write immitating the style my favorite authors have.

(I don't recommend this diet for anyone. It is good for me. I think that the study of grammar - both of the mother-tongue and of the target language - have the utmost importance in the study of a language. Why? Because I do. I think that, at the end, a person who has a solid knowledge of the rules of a language, can perform this same language with much more facility when living in a, e.g., english spoken environment. Think of Otto Maria Carpeaux people: german speaker who became a dean of the portuguese language. Think of Paulo Rónai: hungarian speaker... )

So, when analyzing my learning history according to the communicative principles I can tell you that there were practically none of its characteristics in my learning experience so far. Sorry about that.