WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR YOU, TO LEARN ENGLISH?

Level 4 - Post 3 (week 5) >>> Themed/Free Post 1

WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR YOU, TO LEARN ENGLISH?

 organise your writing with these  bullet points:

• - What does it mean to your family?

• - What did it mean when you were at primary school?

• - What does it mean today?

• - How do you feel about learning it?

- Comments: leave a comment on my post + 3 of your classmates posts
- Word Count: 180 words.

______________________________________________

When I was at school learning in my family was a "must", one could not prevent oneself from learning because in doing so, all the hell punishments would fall upon you. Consequently with their belief and even though we were not at all a wealthy family my parents were always buying books for us at home. So learning was something compulsory, it was strongly praised with money if the grades we got at school could show we had learnt or severely punished if the outcome was otherwise.

In this context my relationship with the language, at first, was totally instrumental and money triggered, I needed a good grade and by getting it I would receive money from my parents, and my personal need for acceptance and the continuous stress for being good at learning made me learn it fast and be one of the best in the subject.

Later on, in high-school, my relationship overcame this instrumental period and it turn to be meaningful in other and more diverse ways; in my need for acceptance (not only from my parents now) I noticed that by being very good at learning it, I would receive more appraisal from the school institution and also my classmates would seek for my help to study. So I became the "guy of English" and at some point I made more friends and became more popular and accepted due to my internalization of the foreign language.

Years after, I noticed I had developed "the taste" for teaching and English, so I though why not to mix both interests and venture in the study of the language aiming at teaching it later. My perspective and the significance became mixed, on the one hand it had an emotional root and on the other a professional (instrumental) perspective.

Nowadays, my relationship is more instrumental than ever because with all these many years of learning and training for it, it became no longer distant from my internal world and I have naturalized it so deeply that I no longer think about the learning of it, now I am more concentrated on thinking about teaching it and how deep my way of teaching can influence the lives and perhaps, evolution of the people I have the opportunity of meeting in my classroom.