QUESTIONNAIRE

1. How do you define learning?
Learning is a process in which you use the information around you to make it part of your daily life
2. How do you define teaching?
It is our capacity to influence other people’s learning process sharing your knowledge with them.
3. How do you define language?
I think it is one of the tools we use to communicate with others.
4. What roles are students expected to assume in your classroom?
I want they learn to be researches since my dream is to help them to lean by themselves motivating their curiosity.
5. How do you see your role in the classroom?
I want to be a guide for them and I want to learn with them
6. What are the qualities of a good teacher?
A good teacher has to be responsible, smart, and creative. In the first place, Responsibility is necessary for a good classroom management. In the second place, a teacher needs to have a good grass of what he is teaching and finally, creativity makes classes interesting and let students know that the teacher is not improvising.
7. what kind of interactions occur in your classroom?
I try to implement some games with which my students can interact each other; I like to interact with them asking them different things along the class and I try they share their answers with their classmates in order to check them.
8. What is the most rewarding aspect of teaching for you?
I love when I realize that my students have really leaned something. However, my dream is to awake their curiosity towards the languages learning and help them to be responsible of their learning process.
9. what kind of students do best in your classroom?
Those ones who are interested in learning English and those ones who are responsible
10. what kind of training do you think English language teachers in our context need?
I think it is very important for all of us to learn to deal with difficult situations in a classroom. Moreover, we need to know how we could communicate with our students in order to understand them and help them to deal with their own problems.
11. what kind of support for professional development is there at the place you work or you are familiar with?
Once I could attend to a conference about some tips of how to make our classes interesting wich was organized by the institution. Moreover, we have the opportunity to share with our partners some pieces of advice to deal with difficult situations in the classroom or the way to teach something.
12. what are the best ways to learn a language?
The most important thing is to be motivated to learn the language. Furthermore, it is necessary to be exposed to the language as much as we can and finally, we need to practice a lot.
13. what dialect of English do you think should be taught (American, British, other)?
I think it depends on each one of us. Maybe, some of us are more in contact with American dialect but others prefer the British dialect because it is the place where they want to travel.
14. what changes would you like to make in your own practice?
I would like to have better materials and more time to develop all the activities I want to do with my students.

My English Learning Biography

My English learning experience
Sometimes I used to ask myself what the reason was for what the first semesters at university were not as successful as I hoped. Reflecting on it, I realized that it could be related with the kind of instruction I received since I was at primary school. Therefore, I want to give you an example of how my English learning process was. The purpose of this is to provide you with facts and details, so you can either support my reflection or not.
As the majority of you, my English learning process started at primary school. I had my first English class in third grade. My teacher was Australian. He came to Colombia to teach English for a few months. His teaching methods were based on worksheets which display basic topics such as colors, numbers and things like that. He also taught us some children English songs that I can still remember. I learned some English in those classes. Unfortunately, my Australian English teacher left and I did not have more English classes until I went to high school.
English classes at secondary school were not something special since, they did not demand so much from me. They were 45 minutes long and I had to attend them three or four times a week. One important thing is that classes were focused on grammatical structures, vocabulary acquisition, and translation. Teachers explained the topics and them they gave us worksheets that we had to solve at home. After that, they were checked and graded. Furthermore, Two or three times a year we had the opportunity to go to the computer lab in order to practice and improve our listening skills. The only disadvantage was that we had to make turns to use the equipments, leading to lack of practicing time
Fortunately, things changed in grade tenth. My teacher was great because she tried to help us to develop some our English skills, but the size of the class made it difficult for her to track and guarantee our learning success. Our speaking classes consisted on reading something out loud in front of the class. Listening was based on listening to music we liked. Reading were focused on interesting short stories while writing were related with the creation of short paragraphs about what the teacher suggested. I had the same teacher in eleventh grade. Although she continued with the same methodology, class focused on reading comprehension due to she wanted to train us to present the ICFES test in order to help us to get a good score on that exam.
I considered myself good at English when I was at high school, and I liked to help my classmates when they did not understand something about English. For that reason, I taught I could be an English teacher. Nevertheless, my arrival at university was a frustrating experience since I realized I did not have good English basics. Although I knew about grammatical structures I could neither speak nor understand because I had never properly developed those skills so, when I saw that the most of my classmates could speak and understand English I felt ashamed of myself. My teacher was so strict that I became afraid of her, what made things more difficult for me. I did not know how but, after some months of hard work I started to pick up more and more and eventually, I started to speak in English. I think it all happened when I began to reuse myself what I had learned at high school and mixed it with what I was learning at that moment.

After that, I started to feel proud of myself since I had proven myself that I could do it, and I finally understood that learning English was a process that not only required a good teacher to guide you through but also, it is necessary that you be responsible of your own learning process. After I realized these things, learning English got easier for me. Nonetheless, I am aware that there are several things that I need to continue improving, and as a future teacher I would like to improve English teaching school methodologies in order to avoid that new generations suffer these kinds of frustrating experiences.