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Date Posted: 14:06:09 01/28/04 Wed
Author: Tatiana Matos
Subject: Task 14

Reflect about your own autonomy and write a text telling us if you consider yourself an autonomous person. Include some quotations from the text you read. How would you classify your degree of autonomy?

I don’t think I am a autonomous person because I fell a great necessity to have someone to help me with my studies, I always had difficulties with home works, “In its general application, autonomy implies a capacity to exercise control over one’s own learning.”

When I started my studies at UFMG I thought that I was a good student and that my English was good, but I discovered that I don’t know English. Sometimes I write better in English then in Portuguese but one thing makes me fell uncomfortable, when I try to communicate in English I have problems to express what I want to say, I think that the English we learn is focused at a more elaborated way and I am afraid because people don’t use formal English in day life communication and I think that if we are learning a new communication skill we are supposed to be able to communicate.

Another important thing is that: “Rather it is the teacher who tries to adapt his methodology and materials to the learner, like a doctor writing out a prescription. That is, the majority of the relevant decisions are made for the learner not by him.” I felt it in my English classes; we are different from the others we have different life experience so an English class is full of people with different goals. Since 2004 I think that I am a little bit “stuck” in my English acquisition because there are thing I see but I can’t understand, I think that if I had a particular teacher that could see my mistakes and direct his classes according to what I really need, maybe, my second language acquisition would be better.

From my point of view, English classes are artificial and when we are facing a real situation we don’t know what to say: “learners in formal contexts must be required not simply to practise prefabricated dialogues and role plays, but to use the target language to articulate their own meanings in the fulfilment of communicative purposes that arise naturally in the course of the learning dialogue.” I know that it is my responsibility to look for my goals in learning English but as I said I have difficulties with it and I know that there are people that do it and their English learning is very good but I am not able to do that.

Concluding, I think that I don’t have autonomy in my English learning and that there are many ways to try to find a self-study but I think that, for me, a teacher is necessary and that they have to fit their classes according with their students. “We have to listen to what they don’t say as well as to what they do say. We have to listen to the language they use as well as to the language they don’t use.”

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