José’s Homepage

Welcome to this brand new JOSÉ’S HOMEPAGE!

Here you can find information on this guy, on the academic subject “Computer Assisted Language Learning – CALL” (UFMG) and on the IBUNKA PROJECT*.

I was born in Jequeri Igreja Matriz de Santana , was raised in Ponte Nova and live

in Belo Horizonte Vista de Belo Horizonte , Minas Gerais, Brazil.

I have a Teaching Course and a B.A. in Portuguese, and I study English and German at Faculdade de Letras-FALE of Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais-UFMG (FALE - UFMG), in Belo Horizonte. I can speak Portuguese, English, Spanish and Esperanto, work as an administrative coordinator at an office of technical English support and translation, and my hobbies include walking In the countryside, fishing, playing chess, reading, collecting coins and postal stamps from all over the world. Now I have 4,805 coins from 296 different countries!

I do remember that my first contact with the English language happened in my childhood (I think I was 9 years old), when my teacher —“Dona” Maria Alice—, during a dictation, pronounced the word “interrogation” after a phrase in Portuguese. That was an odd word and I had some difficulty to write and understand what she intended to say by using that strange word after a clear good sentence in Portuguese: “—Acaso não posso ter cheiro de cachorro?” (Why can’t I have a characteristic dog’s smell?) I asked her to repeat the sentence and wrote then in my notebook “interoguêichan”. Next morning she brought us the notebooks with her visa and told us that we were supposed to write the single interrogative mark, and that the word she used in the classroom was an English word. That was my first odd, troubling contact with that language.

boy with question

From 1976 to 1978 I had a crazy Brazilian teacher, graduated in Texas, USA, whose pronunciation was not good at all and whose lessons were boring and extremely based on grammatical rules. After Miss “Quaqua” (she did not know that was her nickname, of course!), in 1979 I had a queer teacher named Beth whose lessons were funny, since we used to sing a lot in the classroom; every class we had to sing with her: “Good morning, my dear teacher! / Good morning! / How are you?” / “I am so very happy to say ‘hello’ to you!”; soon: “One little, two little, three little Indians. Four little, five little, six little Indians. Seven little, eight little, nine little Indians… Ten little Indian boys!” (then eleven Indians, twelve Indians and so on, the whole tribe, forwards and backwards): http://207.103.108.105/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=5710 (Listen to the song! ) In the very beginning, that was funny, but after many repetitions… Later, however, some folk and pop songs were taught in order to teach us pronunciation and cultural aspects of the USA society and lifestyle, and she was always stimulating us to use the target language in the classroom and outside it.

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When I started attending the first year of high school (it was in 1980), another odd teacher appeared: the former mariner Valdomiro (there is a sickly smile on my face right now!). He was very funny and talkative, and nowadays I realize that one of his faults was to talk a lot, instead of “provoking” us to talk (during his classes, student talking time was almost zero, since he was keen of English and his own memories and talked a lot about his own experiences, his farm, his green Fusca (VW), etc. His lessons, however, were grammar-based and his examinations were hated by all of us (students). Now and then, some of my classmates even precluded his work, by damaging the electrical outlet or turning off a switch. After this first year of high school, we did not have English classes at that public school anymore, because there were many other subjects related to our technical course to be taught/learnt.

In 1989, however (yes, folks, I am almost as old as a dinosaur, but I still do not bite, ok?), I started learning English by myself, reading the “Speak Up” magazine, attending a distance term course and exchanging letters with people from different countries. The problem was that I only practiced reading and writing; no listening, no talking at all, and such a procedure brought me some problems, some limitations, later on, when I decided to attend a “normal” course at a private English school. Once, the owner of the school invited me to talk about my experience towards English, because she worked as my teacher and was very impressed concerning my written English, but a little bit confused, because normally I avoided to read aloud and I was a kind of “silent” student in classroom.

When I told her about the way I had learned some English, she congratulated me for my personal achievements, commented the dangers that are implicit in such a kind of self-instruction that neglects the importance of working together the four skills (listening, talking, reading and writing) and invited me to join a free conversation group at school. I could not do that, due to my professional activities, but that advice was very helpful when I decided to learn Spanish and Esperanto.

I must point out, however, that in the last 10 years I’ve also attended courses at British School (in the upstate, British School – Ponte Nova-MG) and ICBEU (in João Monlevade and Belo Horizonte), with excellent teachers who use, competently the Communicative Approach. One of them (an unforgettable teacher with whom I tackled and passed my first Cambridge examination, years and years ago) was a kind of actress in classroom and, now and then I feel I imitate her teaching style while teaching. Another excellent teacher, an American girl, was amazing and fairly demanding (everyday we were given a theme when the lesson time was almost over, in order to write a composition in strictly counted five minutes, to be read and corrected by her). Her techniques included the selection of some of our texts to be published in a school newspaper and, besides, at least once a month an outdoor activity on Saturdays was offered and Portuguese was forbidden.

Anyway, I must confess that until now, even with some good international certificates (of English, from Cambridge, Michigan, and Oxford; and of Spanish: DELEs “Básico” and “Superior”), I keep on making foolish slips/mistakes when writing and speaking English (this site witnesses some of these problems) and Spanish, and I have some hindrances when trying to spell some German words or sentences. Such limitations can be explained by the methods I used at the very beginning of my learning experience related to those seducing languages.

Visit our academic subject web site and know about more about us, about

CALL and the IBUNKA PROJEKT: *http://www.veramenezes.com/call205.htm! You are welcome!

Some interesting sites on Communicative Approach and English Learning/Teaching: http://www.veramenezes.com

http://www.learnenglish.org.uk

http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej26/int.html

http://www.eslbears.com/

http://eleaston.com/

http://www.english4all.pro.br/

http://perso.wanadoo.es/autoenglish/

Useful pages on Numismatics: http://www.joelscoins.com/

http://www.numismatics.org/

http://www.nasc.net/