English-Education Autobiography

 I experienced four phases of English learning: elementary, junior-high, senior-high and college years. Some characteristics which differ these four phases will be discussed accordingly in the following paragraphs. However, the last paragraph will constitute the reflection of educational philosophy on one of these four phases of my English learning experience.

I started learning English from 4^th grade of elementary school. My English teacher in elementary strictly taught the students rules of English. We did not do much real-life speaking activities. Mostly, if it came to speaking, my teacher would start with grammar elaboration, and gave provided-dialogues drills. The dialogues were, now I realize, far from the real life dialogues. They were designed for the purpose of teaching grammar; sometime they sound nonsense and ridiculous but they presented grammar point that my teacher wanted us to understand. My teacher had a very important role just like a leader of an orchestra. She determines what book to read, which dialogues to memorized and what should not be learned just yet.

            In junior high school, things got better. My junior-high English teacher had a perfect pronunciation and better teaching approach. Unlike my elementary English teacher who emphasized on structure; my junior-high English teacher emphasized on language function. Thus, we had lots of English speaking practices. English structures were also introduced but they were inclusively (not separately) introduced in reading text and our speaking activities. Listening activities was limited to listening my English teacher’s reading a loud. I had so much fun during these three years of junior high school.

            And in senior high school, my English class was more into reading-text based. Grammar rules were totally neglected. We read Snow White story and discussed other reading texts. However, we had not much speaking and listening activities during these years.

In college years, everything was so drastically different. At the beginning of every course, the lecturers would introduce the goal of the course and the coverage material. We were assigned to do many individual tasks and group presentations. The learning objectives were determined but students had chance to develop their own learning, i.e. to read any books or resources that can help achieving the objective of learning. The Lecturers gave assistances on what topics should be covered and highlighted important points that we may missed in our presentations. I also learned from what other group presented, because they may read different books, and thus, presented something that I may not know yet. Therefore, I learned both from my lecturers and friends. At the end of the session, the lecturers would normally summarize the concept that had been discussed and ensured that all students understood the concept. Very often, one session enriched with another assignment to enhance deeper understanding.

Among these phases that I experienced in learning English, I would like to focus on reflecting my college learning with the educational philosophy. I think my college learning is based on existentialism philosophy. This philosophy believes that truth, the world and goodness are subjectively defined and that change is necessary at all times. Teacher gives assistances but open for students’ subjective and personal opinion. Teacher is not the only information source. Teacher gives assignment and students should be active to find ways to help them accomplish the task. Students are independent, ie. they build their own learning, to what extent they would like to learn. Teacher facilitates them with important concept and assignment that gear them to attain the objective of the lesson. The values constituted in this philosophy are awakening students’ self-responsibility, i.e  doing the task independently  and arousing students’ responses toward particular issues, i.e. presenting their own opinion on something confidently.

Based on my experiences I attain different learning aspects. In elementary I learned to listen to instruction ad remember rules. My junior high school English learning taught me to learn English communicatively, that English should be learned for communicative purposes. It taught me the idea that language can only be learned when it is used. When learners avoid using English either orally or written, their language acquisition will be very slow. What worse is the language they learned “vanish”. It’s gone. And the last, my college English learning taught me to be independent learner. It is very important to be an autonomous learner who knows what to learn, and how to learn.