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.