Name: Hiromi Katou

Year: 1997

 

     My attitude toward learning English has changed greatly since I entered this university. First of all, I found my interest in English when I was in 6th grade. I started studying English at a private school, and I dreamed to be like my teacher because she told me many interesting stories which she had experienced in foreign countries.

     In JHS, English classes were tiresome because, as you know, I just attended the classes passively and I had no chance to use my English at all. But thanks to the private school, I could practice my English speaking ability, and when I was in 8th grade, I decided to go to America for summer vacation. It was the first time for me to go abroad, and even though it was only a 15-day home-stay, I experienced so many things there. Everything I saw and touched was fresh and interesting. And the most impressive thing was that my host family tried to communicate with me using easy words and body language. Then we could understand each other although I was just a beginner and actually did not know much about English. Since then, I started to study English hard at school.

     In my HS days, studying English was really tough work for me because I had to remember a lot of vocabulary and sentence structures. But I could continue studying owing to my English teacher. He taught me English in second grade in HS, and I liked his way of teaching, especially translations from English to Japanese. To tell the truth, he had been a student of Nanzan university, so I began to consider to enter this university and study English like him.

     Luckily I could enter Nanzan, but the life in this university was so different from what I had expected before. In spring semester, I was terribly busy because of much homework from each class and my part time job as a waitress; in addition, I was dreadfully tired mentally from the new situation around myself. So I could not practice strategies for leaning English which I learned from O.C. classes. As a result, I could not make a big progress in the Michigan test for the spring semester.

            But from summer vacation, I changed my mind. During the summer, I was actually language hungry! I watched Sesame Street and other English programs on TV, shadowed them, read English books, spoke to myself in English and so on. After I had continued this work for almost 2 months, I made progress on the test at the beginning of the fall semester.

            I am now doing English telephone work once a week with my friend, and this work encourages me very much. Now, I am happy with this university and I hope I will be able to continue to improve my English skill.