Hola!
It's been a while since I last updated this blog. I know. My mistake.
It's gonna be a bit busy semester. I'm teaching several courses, including the new Integrated Communicative Course. Basically, it's a combo of Extensive Reading and Extensive Listening. Whoa!
So, I have new students that hopefully will enjoy their reading-and-listening journey—and eventually love English more!
This week, my students and I started by sharing experiences about learning languages, not just English, and our reading and listening stories so far. I invited them to reflect on their memories and stories.
I myself first learned English at elementary school. Back then, I hated it, seriously.
While somewhat I liked to learn topical words, I knew nothing about why I had to memorize all the irregular verbs, for example. The teacher, who happened to not master English (yes, we had no teacher majoring in English at that time), simply write down the words or structures that she copied from the coursebook. I failed at understanding English.
It was my tutor—guru les—who made me fall in love with that foreign language. He taught with a grammar-translation method. Lots of grammatical points to learn, but I did enjoy it! Plus, he gave us those short (funny) texts to read from Hill's collection of reading texts. And I won't forget that I grew up with those silly stories of Nasreddin Hodja. My cousin and I studied with the same tutor. Sometimes a few new friends joined in.
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| Hill's reading comprehension book and Murphy's grammar book |
Since then, I got more and more curious and eager to learn English. My EFL teacher in junior and senior high school also did well in teaching the language! They're among those who inspired me to be a teacher. I even remember once I asked my teacher if she knew anything about TOEFL, while I wrongly understood it. LOL. When she finally gave her copy of TOEFL, I was puzzled.
I bought a few books on English trivia and quizzes, fun ones to do. And I did buy Murphy's legendary grammar reference book when I was in high school.
As I grew with my grammar-translation-influenced teachers, I was rarely confident to speak in English. Even when my tutor invited me to discuss things in English, I was reluctant to respond to his questions. My cousin was more challenged to answer those questions. And speaking classes were not my cup of tea when I was studying at uni (I got a BC for my Speaking 3 course. #sad)
Now that I am an EFL teacher, I always try to challenge myself to read and listen to more things in English. Oh, I still love Bahasa Indonesia, too. After all, I love language and learning languages (and I'm learning Spanish too: soy Daniel y soy un maestro de Ingles!).
What about my students' reflections? Well, you might be interested in their newest blog updates.
- Aldila, who found inspiration for learning English from a Korean film.
- Alex and his 'English Hut'. What a creative name!
- Kezia, who fell in love with English after reading Franklin the Turtle!
- Arba`Ul. She was introduced to English in her elementary school.
- Arin, #TeamPessimistic here. LOL
- Axl and how he learned English from playing games! Haha
- Betty; she watched some English films and started to like the language more and more.
- Dwi, who began to love English from watching Narnia!
- Enya and her dream to be an English teacher. Woohoo!
- Jessica, who enjoys writing for her self-expression
- Tegar. He started to love English in his fourth year at elementary school!
- Tita, who thinks that speaking is easier than writing.
- Widhi and her experiences on learning English
- Viza, who enjoys reading in English.
