Escolaridade: Superior Completo - Letras
Idade: 40 anos
Narrativa coletada por Vera Menezes em Julho/2004
When I was about 16 years old, I had my first English teacher. When I heard her English, I found it was so interesting that I decided to study the language. I was fascinated by the pronunciation.
I got some books in English and started to practice the dialogues playing both participants. I copied a lot of the rules from an English grammar and also copied some exercises from graded exercise books that presented the use of verbal tenses. I had a Portuguese-English dictionary that was excellent. I copied some rules on pronunciation and translated some texts from English into Portuguese and vice-versa.
When I was about 18 years old I went to study at CEFET-MA, where I met an excellent English teacher. His name was Ivan Ribeiro and he could speak both British and American English.
One day after his class, I asked him where I could learn how to speak English fluently. He said I should go to ICBEU-MA. I also asked him to teach me some strategies to learn the language. The he gave me two magazines (Newsweek and Time) and advised me to buy the Oxford Advanced learner’s dictionary. He told me to translate some articles from the magazines, and he said I should buy a 5-band radio in order to listen to the VOA (The Voice of American) and the BBC (British Broadcast Corporation) programs. So I listened to these programs at night as on the following day I compared the news with the ones on “Jornal Nacional”.Doing so, I got confidence in pronunciation, listening comprehension and translation.
I developed a system to learn vocabulary. I looked for all the words with the same routs and learned them together, like this: employ, employment, unemployment, employer, employee, etc. I compared the words in both Portuguese and English dictionaries to understand their meanings.
When I got a job, I decided to study at ICBEU-MA. I took a placement test and I was sent to the basic level. After one year I had to travel to Guadalupe, Piaui. Then, I studied by myself for about one year. When I returned, I went to ICBEU-MA and took another placement test and I was sent to the intermediate level. One year later, there was a TTC (teacher’s training Course) and a placement test for teachers. I passed the test and started teaching at the institute. One year later I passed the vestibular examination for Literature at UFMA (Universidade Federal do Maranhão).
Before finishing the course, I wanted to convince myself that I was able to speak and rite in English, so I proposed to my adviser (Silvia Dualibe) that I wanted to write and present my monograph in English and the title was “The Chief Differences between British and American English”.
After some more studies I took the Michigan test and I got both competence and proficiency certificates in English.
OBS: I must say that I learned a lot about English language using comparison between the structures of Portuguese and English.
