Fast Ways in English Speaking

The first time I learnt English was in Junior Secondary School from 1996 until 1999 and it was in SLTP Negeri 1 Towuti in East Luwu. At that time I hated English very much but after I watched TITANIC movie, then I was...I am interested in learning English. It was because of I was curious with the language that the actor and the actress spoke of. At that time, the question in my mind was only ‘actually what are they talking about?’. And from that moment I started to love and listen to western songs and to watch western movies until now. Sometimes, I watched MTV Asia which motivated me in speaking English.
In my first grade in junior secondary School, I was taught English by my teacher Mr. Syahril by using Grammar-translation method. He taught us tenses much in his time allocation teaching. At that time, he used to teach his students tenses, sometimes one kind of tenses for one meeting. Besides, he asked us to memorize some vocabularies with a special theme in each meeting. For example, he gave us vocabularies about healthy this week and we had to memorize them for the next week. The students who did not memorize one of those vocabularies would get scores because our teacher directly gave us our score after we memorized those vocabularies one by one in front of him.
In my second grade in junior high school, my teacher still Mr. Syahril, still used grammar-translation method. Even the used method was grammar-translation, but my teacher began to use integrated skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing). It is because at that time, my school began to use textbooks, which published by Erlangga, especially for all of our main subjects, such as English, mathematics, saints, history and so on.
Sometimes my teacher asked us to open a certain passage in the textbook. In that page, there was a short passage. Then, Mr. Syahril asked one of the students to read the passage. Then, he might ask another student to read the passage once more after the first student finished his reading. After about five or seven students had read the passage, then Mr. Syahril us whether we knew the main idea of the passage or not. From here, we knew that my teacher, Mr. Syahril at that time integrated listening-reading-speaking.
My learning experiences in my third grade in Junior High School were not really different from my second grade. The difference was my teacher had been changed. My teacher at that time was Mr. Muhammad Jaya. He was very kind, patient, and smart teacher. It had been proved in his teaching time, no one of the students were absent. All my friends and me always attended his class because besides he taught us, he used to make a joke and made the students were interested in learning English.
I joined senior High School from 1999-2002. This period was included as the years when I loved to learn English. In my school, there was just two department, they were science and social. Actually, I wanted to master about English by entering social department. But in reality, I saw that the students of social department never studied their subjects seriously. Then, I took my decisions to join to the science class as my teacher offered me after seeing my achievement during my first grade in Senior High School. And thanks God, I made right decision at that time because the improvement of my English became more and more exciting.
In Senior High School, I had hobbies which related to English such as listened to the western songs, watched western movies, sent letters and e-mail to the MTV ASIA which headed in Singapore. In my Senior High School era, English songs were very popular such as Westlife, Celine Dion, Britney Spears and many others. My favorite movie at that time was TITANIC, and the films which played by the same actor Leonardo DiCaprio such as Romeo & Juliet, the Man in the Iron Mask, the Basketball Diaries and many others. At that time, I loved watching MTV ASIA in order I could train my listening and speaking of English. MTV at that time was not the same as MTV today which subtitled what the VJ said.
My English teacher from the first grade to the third grade was the same person. She was Mrs. Safan. It was clear that she used integrated skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) in teaching us. She always used English in her teaching time as the language instruction and it is done until now as I visited my school before the lebaran day this year. She sometimes combined between English and Indonesia, but she mostly spoke in English.
I still remembered well, some time in her teaching time, she brought us a tape with an English song or cassette. One day she played a song entitled ‘my heart will go on’ which sung by Celine Dion. She gave us a piece of paper which contained the lyric of that song but it had been emptied some its words. She asked us to complete it while we listened to the played song. So, in this case, she integrated between listening and writing. In the next meeting, she asked us to open and read a passage in the textbook. After reading the passage, we were asked what the main idea of that passage was. So we randomly gave our comment about the main idea of the passage. So, here our teacher integrated between reading and speaking.
Sometime Mrs. Safan read us a short story and we were asked to write it on a piece of paper. Then, that paper would be collected and divided back to the students randomly to check up the missing and wrong words in that story. Here, Mrs. Safan clearly integrated between writing and reading. I always got the best score from Mrs. Safan from my first grade until third grade in my Senior High School.
I joined university in 2002. In university, it is clearly that we can find the four integrated skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing). In my faculty we have subjects of those skills such as listening and listening comprehension, reading and reading comprehension, speaking and writing. Besides, I often used to join English camps whether it was held in or outside Makassar. In English camp, speaking is the most emphasized knowledge. I also used to join English meeting club in my campus which holds every Wednesday and Friday. In this meeting, the four integrated skills were done.
Students’ Executive Council (BEM) in Faculty of Letters of Universitas Muslim Indonesia (UMI) Makassar has a program namely Up Grading. Up Grading is held twice in year, which is in the end of each semester. It is a kind of English Camp which isolates students and obligates students to speak in English whenever and whatever we do 24 hours in a day. In this program we are given the four integrated skills, the eight integrated materials, the hottest issues about English, and many others. Some of its programs are professional meeting, speech, tete a tete, seminar, discussion, morning lecture, and many others. Thus, I bravely said that most of my English knowledge I got from Up Grading.

Posted by miasastra

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