Name: Pollyana Teixeira

When I was eight years old, my cousin started to study English. As we were very close to each other, she started to tell me everything about her classes and started to translate the music (click to listen to the music: ) we used to like. After two years, when I was ten years old, I had the opportunity to study English at a language school. I didn’t have English classes at elementary school and, as everything was new for me, I loved it! After some time, my cousin and I started to talk in English when we were with our family and as nobody could understand it, we though that it was very funny. The school where I took the junior high and the high school, used to give a big importance to English and, because of that, I had classes twice a week, in small classes (ten students that have the same level of English). I continue do study English in the language school and after seven years, I took the FCE.

I started to study Nutrition and, because of that, I stopped to study English. But I never stopped to read articles and texts in English. When I was in my third semester of Nutrition, as I didn’t like the course, I decided to try the vestibular for Letras, at UFMG. After this, I started to study English and Nutrition at the same time. After one year, I had a big problem: I loved Nutrition and Letras. During my learning process, I think that I didn’t have a lot of problems because I loved English at first. But today I see that I had a lot of teachers that makes the classes very boring. Some teachers were in the center of the process all the time and they didn’t give the students the opportunity to show what they want to learn. The course of Letras was very important to me because it gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about English Literature and, as a consequence, my vocabulary is much better today than it used to be.

Nowadays, I am already a dietician and at the end of the year I will finish my course of Letras. I decided to work with Nutrition but I really loved to study English at Letras and I would do everything again. I just would like to have teachers that listen more to the students since the beginning, when I was starting to learn English. I think that the process of learning would become more interesting.

“A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops”.

(Henry Adams)