Hello, ladies and gentlemen, I'm Carrie.
Now I am an English teacher in cram schools to teach senior high school students
how to prepare for the college entrance exam.
Besides, I teach English at Taipei Broadcasting Station and Chinatimes.com.
Today I feel so happy to be here to share some ideas of learning English with you.
Since I was a little girl,
I have been very interested in English.
Therefore, I asked my mom to hire a foreign teacher as my tutor to teach me English.
The teacher, who is a British,
came to my house to have conversations with me.
At that time, I thought I could improve my English ability
by having a foreigner speaking English with me.
However, I was totally wrong.
WHY?
Because I didn’t have sufficient vocabulary in my mind.
I didn’t have excellent listening comprehension
to understand what he was talking about.
At that time, each time he came, I was collapsed.
I didn’t understand what he was doing most of the time.
Some embarrassing conversations even happened to me.
For instance, he asked me,
“What does your father do?”
I said, “My father is a businessman, and she is….”
The teacher responded with astonishment,
“What? Is your father ‘a woman’?”
Oh my goodness, how could I make that mistake?
I felt so embarrassed and disappointed.
I spent a lot of money to learn English, but I could hardly answer a simple question.
After that, I made up my mind to practice English by myself.
When I walked and saw people on the street,
I would whisper with a low voice and speak to myself,
“Oh, she is a woman, and he is a man. She is beautiful, and he is ugly.”
By doing so, I could easily distinguish the difference between “he” and “she”,
and I succeeded.
From then on, I always looked for some English words that were alien to me,
such as the priority seat on the MRT
or the instructions on a bottle and so on.
Any new word, any new information about English,
would be absorbed by my brain.
That’s the way I obtain the sense of achievement in learning English.
As for my teaching technique,
the core competency of my teaching
is that I like to inspire my students to have passion for English.
For example, I would teach my students the longest word in the dictionary,
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis
or supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
The reason is that
I want to induce their curiosity and encourage them to have a try.
Whether the students like English or not,
they are all willing to give it a try.
That’s how I draw their attention and trigger their inquisitive mind.
However, I insist that all Taiwanese students should learn English grammar.
It’s because we are not native speakers.
If you want to speak correct English fluently,
you have to learn English grammar thoroughly.
Maybe it sounds like a cliché,
but I know the significance of that.
On the other hand, if you want to learn speaking and listening,
there are a wide range of methods offered to you.
Take Voicetube as an example,
you can learn by yourself to cultivate your listening ability
and speak the words loudly with the subtitles.
With such good methods,
you can improve your capability to learn English well.
I believe that English is beautiful as long as you love it.
Don’t miss any opportunities that you can learn English.
Are you ready? Let’s go!