My best and worst English course
The best foreign language course I ever took was a English course in an academy at Antequera. The teacher was a native English speaker and he didn’t know any Spanish words. We didn’t follow any book he just handed out very useful photocopies to practice all the skills, interesting texts to practice our reading, great worksheets to work out in our pronunciation, etc. What I most like was the communicative approach. We always used to learn words that English people use every day and to make the learning easier he usually show us some strategies to remember structures of sentences or vocabulary. Additionally, in order to supplement our lessons we used to play fun games like; bingo, mime, snakes & ladders, role play, flashcards, etc. All these kinds of activities motivated me to continue studying English. I remember every Friday we had a little test about all the knowledge that we had acquired during the week. That was fantastic because you could evaluate yourself and see your big progression. In these little tests errors were tolerated, only huge mistakes were took into consideration, but not as a punishment.

On the contrary, the worst foreign language course I have ever taken was an English course at the University of Malaga. Even though the teacher was a native English speaker, he followed the traditional methodology, meaning we used to do every exercise of the book even if the exercise was useless. To increase our level of pronunciation we did the chorus drill, every lesson we did exercises about grammar and memorized big list of vocabulary words without context. Sometimes we used translators because according to him it was a clear way to understand the meaning of difficult words. At the end of every term we used to do some exams, most were writing exams and errors were punished severely.

Thank you for your help :)

First notebook entry: Introducing myself

Hello, I am learning English because I want to get a better job in my country. My native language is Spanish and I grew up in Izalco, San Salvador El Salvador. At this time I am living in San Salvador with my husband and my two children. If someone is learning Spanish I will help.

Hello people!

Today is my first day here and I don´t understand? I hope this helps me to learn English.