Nome:  Joelma Machado Gonçalves

Idade:  25

Escolaridade: superior em curso - Letras  

Narrativa coletada por Francisco Figueiredo

 

When I was 15 years old my parents decided to send my young sister and me to the United States of America. They were getting divorced and did not want us to go through it.  When I first arrived I did not know what “-Hi” meant.  I was never very crazy for the language I just studied for the test and then I forgot everything.  I thought it was too difficult for me to ever learn such a thing.  Speaking a different language to me was something for someone extra intelligent and I did not think I was able to do so.  Besides it was not my cup of tea.  I preferred Portuguese literature to English.  The little I know that all of these would be put into one dish, one course for me. Letras.

Anyways, when I arrived at the airport I said “hello” to the policeman standing by a door and he said “hi”. I was expecting to hear hello back not that.  So I asked my sister what does “hi” mean and she answered the same as hello and I asked why are there two ways of saying the same thing?  She just laughed.

In my little head I was just there to spend a month with my older sister and my nephew.  So I didn’t really have to learn that weird language.  But 5 of my cousins were living there and were already going to school.  They were all excited about the fact of learning a new language.  Then my mom called me 3 days after I had arrived to tell me that I would study there for some time to learn the language.  There I was in another country, away from my parents for the first time, and on top of that having to learn that language.

As I knew that was what had to be done I went for it.  All of my cousins were going to school and I wasn’t yet because of some documents that had to be sent from Brazil.  So I had more time to walk around then they did.  In the morning I used to go to all the shops that were near my house to check things out and “talk” to the old people that were there doing nothing waiting for someone to give them attention.

I did not know a word in English so I would point at things and they would say the name and I would repeat it.  Every time they tried to carry on a conversation I would say “I no speak English” and you know what that comes out in oral language, exactly the opposite I was trying to say.  So they kept on talking I was very confused.  Then I asked my sister how I would say “Eu nao sei falar Ingles.” When she told me I then realized what I had been doing.

My papers then arrived and I was ready to go to school.  I was put in an English as a Second Language class where almost everyone spoke Spanish, even the teacher.  I first found Spanish so ugly and I did not want to learn it but all of my cousins were sort of speaking it, so I had to.  In one month’s time I was speaking Spanish fluently.  Along with my “English” class I had History, Math, Home Economics and others.  In these other classes I was forced to try to communicate in English.  My History teacher always tried to talk to me but my understanding was very limited so he used to write me personal notes asking me how I was feeling.  I remember the first notes he wrote to me were: How are you?

Do you like the United States?

Do you miss home?

Maybe there were other questions but right now I remember these three. So I decided to answer them. To the first one I wrote “fine” to the second “yes” of course I had so much more to say but I was happy enough to be able so say yes but the third, oh god!  I had never seen that structure before I was there for not even a month.  I looked the word up in the dictionary, the trouble word “miss” and guess what I found?  Have you ever looked it up? Do it.  In the mini-dic I had the only meaning for miss was “senhorita”.  I was very frustrated because I couldn’t understand the question and therefore I couldn’t answer it.  I copied the question then gave the paper back to the teacher, pointed at the question and said “no, sorry”.  The teacher touched my shoulder, smiled and said “that’s ok”.  I think that was the first contact I had with rapport.  I had no idea then what that was, but it certainly made a difference.

As soon as I saw my cousins at the cafeteria I asked them what the question meant.  They had been living there a month longer than me but even though they did not know it.  One of their Hispanic friends told us what it was.  I immediately wrote a note back. “Yes, very much” I did not eat instead I ran to the teacher’s room and left it on his desk.  That day I felt that I could communicate in the difficult language.

Not long after I started school summer came and it was vacation time.  No school, no Mr. Armstrong to write me notes, just my Brazilian cousins.  In one of those ordinary days in which my cousins and I had our windows wide open while we danced Bahia music, a group of boys from the building adjacent to ours stared at us.  When we realized we got embarrassed and stopped dancing.  They all shouted: “continue”.  It was the first time I saw my definite English teacher: Keith.

One sunny afternoon I was sitting on a wall feeling homesick.  He came and sat beside me and asked me “Do you miss home?” I looked at him and answered “Yes, very much”.  He continued asking me questions but I did not know most of them.  So he acted them out.  He asked me what I liked doing.  I guess that that was what he asked I just understood the word ‘like’.  I said that I liked playing volleyball.  I actually didn’t say it I stood up and mimed.  He then said volleyball? And I repeated it.  Guess what I found sitting on my doorway on the very next day? Yes, a volleyball.

He bought a Portuguese/English dictionary so that he could say the words I didn’t understand.  Once he came to me and said: you are a ‘ladra’.  I got very confused and asked him what he was trying to say he opened the dictionary and showed me the word ‘thief’.  He then mimed: You stole my heart.  I know that this sounds cheesy but believe it or not that was how I learnt English.  Whenever Keith wanted to say something to me he used mime or pointed at something or he even looked the word up in the dictionary to say it to me.  Most of the time he didn’t know how to pronounce the word, so I looked it up and said it to him.  Due to this I felt the need to always see the new word I was learning.  Every time I learnt a new word I had to know how it was spelt.  I could then visualize the word and from then on I would start using it.

Since I was involved in a relationship I had to speak with him.  I would then experiment, try, take a risk and communicate.  Here is when the corrections begun.  Of course I was very inaccurate and used the verbs in the wrong tense, so every time I said something “wrongly” Keith would look at me and say the right way very tenderly.  I remember that once I wanted to say something in the past tense but I did not know how, I then mimed and he gave me the verb in the past. I said: I go (and then pointed to the back) church. No use of preposition either. He said: went, you went to church. I said: yes, I went to church.

Keith was an intelligent man he knew that I needed some extra studies to learn faster so he gave me a list of irregular verbs and told me to memorize them.  I first sat down with a dictionary and translated the whole list then, I asked him how to pronounce some verbs and then wrote them down many times.  The list was in alphabetical order; therefore I used to take each letter at a time to memorize.  By the end of three days I had the whole list memorized and then our conversations became much easier. 

I still got many things mixed up and did not know how to say a whole bunch of things but I ‘talked’ to people I was not embarrassed to make a fool of myself, I just did it.

By the end of the summer I went back to school and the teachers were amazed at my development.  I started taking regular classes and taking the tests.  3 months was how long it took me to have to use the language seriously.  I was not fluent but I was able to carry on High School.

Today, years later I see how useful were the corrections because I got irritated sometimes I simply did not want to be corrected.  If I had not been corrected I could have carried on some ‘addition’ in the misusage of the language. 

Learning English made a whole difference to my life and I am sure people learn in different ways.  I was really well motivated to learn the language and that for me is the key of it.  Why do you want to learn English? You have to know how to answer that and from then on find out how you or your students can learn better.