My English Learning History

By Maria Luiza Pedrosa

The unforgettable meeting

In 1997, I was 15 and I was a typical teenager in Belo Horizonte: braces on, pimples, parties, boys… This was my world. I used to study at CEFET and I had many friends there. One friend of mine, Camilinha, invited me to go out with her, her sister and an exchange student from England.

That’s when everything started. We had planned our night carefully: “First we are going to a bar to get to know the British boy better, then we are going to eat something and finally we are going to a nightclub”. I must say that I found out I shouldn’t have left home. I didn’t know Camilinha and her sister were fluent in English! I felt so bad, I could only say silly words and I couldn’t utter a single sentence. I was speechless for the rest of the night.

The next day I woke up with one thing in mind: English. The only thing I could think of was: “I want to learn it, I have to learn it, I need to learn it”. I talked to my mother and she agreed that it was time to study English. She had a friend who used to teach private classes and had just opened a small English school called “Oficina do Inglês”.

So, I started studying English in 1997. My teacher was really cool and hyper. I loved her classes so much that after the first month I changed my course from twice to four times a week. Alice, my teacher, realized how dedicated I was and she started giving me extra exercises. One afternoon, Alice called me at home:

The YMCA

Alice told me about an exchange program in Belo Horizonte called ICCP. This program is an international program sponsored by the YMCA for young people and it gives people from all over the world the opportunity to work in summer camps in the USA. Although I got really excited about ICCP, there was one problem: I must be 18 to take part in the program and I was 16! Anyways, that phone call changed my life.

I was too anxious to turn 18! When I finally was of age, I went to the YMCA branch in Belo Horizonte and started training as a candidate to go to the USA in the summer of 2000. The ICCP training had English as its first language and it started on September 1999 and it finished on March 2000. It was divided into three parts: Part 1 was an interview in English, which I did really badly! Part 2 was the tough one; the candidates had to go to the YMCA every Saturday AND Sunday to learn recreation techniques, camp songs, arts and crafts, American culture, American games… it was fun but at the same time very tiring and stressful because we were supposed to speak English all the time! Part three was for the selected candidates, and it included specific courses such as First Aid and Lifeguard. All these courses were given by The Red Cross. There was a camp trip to Serra do Cipó to learn outdoor activities such as horse back riding, canoeing and rappelling. This training was very important to my learning process because even though it was an artificial environment to speak English, we were exposed to the language in different situations and we had to use it.

My experience in the USA

May 27^th 2000: With butterflies in my stomach, I rode the plane to the USA. I believe that my experience in the USA started on the plane… Talking to the flight attendants was an adventure! Although there were Portuguese speakers on the plane, I insisted on speaking Spanglish to the flight attendants. It was great fun because they were very nice to me. When the plane landed in Dallas, Texas I though: everything is going to be ok, there is no need to worry. Poor me! At the airport, there was a woman holding a sign with my name on it. It was Kimberly Cook, who would become my boss later. She was very kind and curious about Brazil. I tried to talk to her but her accent was very different from everything I had heard of so far. Click here to listen to a sample of a Texan speaking.

I went to the USA to work in a summer camp, not to study so I had to learn my new duties at the same time that I had to catch up with the language. There I learnt how to sail, to ride horses, to ski, to drive boats, to play baseball… most important of all, I learnt how to take care of myself because it was my first time away from home.

I believe that being exposed to the English language in its natural environment has made all the difference. By the end of the summer, people were impressed with the improvement of my English. Two friends I had met at camp, Laura Crew from England and Leanne Secombre from Australia invited me to go on a road trip around the USA. We went to San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Memphis, Atlanta, Everglades, Miami, Key West and New York.

In 2001 I was invited to go back to YMCA Camp Grady Spruce to work as a representative of the international staff.

Back home

When I got back home, another phone call from Alice has changed my life:

Alice invited me to work with her at Oficina do Inglês and I accepted. I worked there from September 2000 to September 2002. At the beginning I was afraid but after all I got more confident and realized that the best way to learn English was by teaching it. That was when I made the decision of doing vestibular at UFMG.

UFMG

I did vestibular at the end of 2000 and in 2001 I was a freshman at Faculdade de Letras. In the beginning of the course, I though I was in college only to get a degree… poor me! I faced so many new things concerning English, such as Phonetics and Phonology. Among all the subjects, Literature has always been my favorite. I have already studied Irish Literature, American Poetry, 19^th Century Literature, Immigrant Writing in the USA and African American Literature. Next year I will try a master degree on Literature and I will write about Maria Helena Viramontes, a chicana writer from the USA.

Work experience with English

After getting in college, I got really involved with English and in September 2002 I saw an add on a wall at FALE saying that a school called MAI English was looking for a person to work for it as a material development assistant trainee. I didn’t hesitate and sent my resume to MAI. After some tests, I was hired! The work was not easy; I had to develop material for a course of upper level students focused on speaking. I was under the supervision of Cintia Zaitune (who works for Richmond nowadays) and I found her brilliant. She taught me many things about material development and editing. After six months working as a trainee, MAI hired me as an English teacher. Nowadays I work at Buritis branch and I am very happy there.

Besides MAI English, I work for a publishing house called Thomson as a reviewer for graded readers. Thomson is based in Boston, USA so I do the entire job through the Internet.

Volunteer Job

In 2000 I became an official member of the YMCA and I worked there for 4 years. I was a counselor in Brazil training and selecting people to go to summer camps in the USA. Every Saturday and Sunday I would go to a YMCA branch in Belo Horizonte to help the ICCP candidates and the official language of those meetings was English. In 2001 I hosted two American counselors in my house and it was great fun.

Conclusion

My learning process was and is really affected by the exposure to the language. Believing this as a teacher, I try to create an environment in the classroom where students have to speak as much English as possible. Although I have worked as a teacher for 5 years, I feel I still have much to learn and I can never stop studying English.

Learning by experience often is painful-

and the more it hurts, the more you learn.

Ralph Banks