What I think about English

My beliefs

English

I have always considered English to be very important in people's lives at this moment due to the fact that it is becoming a must to communicate in most countries around the world. One can be acknowledged of a specific subject different than English but still needs to learn English to be able to understand written or spoken information at work. English is not something that people want to learn in order to do business in English spoken countries anymore. Instead, it is something that people need to learn to accomplish better performance in their working and personal life.

Learning

Learning happens all the time in our daily basis. We learn more unconsciously than consciously. Our first source for learning is our parents. They are the teachers of every human. In fact, we need to be taught from the beginning of our lives since we are not able to perform anything. Then, the first adults that we meet in our lives are going to give us the essentials on how to live. After that we are taken into schools to learn more specific subjects, getting a wider vision of the world that surrounds us. We go into an educational process learning from different teachers and professors for great part of our life. But, learning opportunities are shown outside schools and university all the time. We learn from our own actions, people we see, other people's experiences, among others. Indeed, learning is an ongoing process and something inevitable in all human beings.

Teaching

All people can learn but not all can teach. Same as learning, teaching can happen anywhere though. It is not only a process meant to work in a classroom. Teaching others is just the guidance we provide to learn what we already know. As illustrated before in my metaphor, it is the knowledge transfer that happens in the interaction we have with anybody. Nevertheless, a variety of theories and practices need to be taken into account to be able to teach. One may know about the subject but may not know how to teach it to others. That is why it takes time for teachers to prepare on the field, practice and reflect on their process with the experiences the teacher may encounter in their journey.

Language teaching

I strongly agree that before getting their bacherlor's degree in teaching languages, most fresh teachers share similar beliefs about language teaching. However some of those beliefs change when you start facing real contexts, and a few of them do not change much after their practice teaching. Base on my four years of teaching experience and regarding a private school context in Neiva, I believe that the language aptitude exists and our students have the potential to learn English. In fact, English is not a difficulty language that most students can learn to speak well within their primiary and mainly high school levels. I also believe that some skills such as speaking and writing are more difficult than listening and reading. Learning grammar rules is always a hard task for some teenagers, amd vocabulary is a very important support to build language in primary. Talking about translation it has been unnecessay, nowadays its eassier for learners to understand new words and new expressions by using the context itself. Finally, it is important to state that learning the cultural knowledge of the language is a meaningful way to motivate students to learn not only the target language but a new and rich culture as well.