Week 2 - Second Language Proficiency - my saga with foreign languages

Standardized tests represent a recent interest in my studies on Education. My personal experience with them is little, but I had tried some. I studied English from 13 to 18 years old in Brazil, in a private language course. I remember to have developed a good fluency, with not very large vocabulary, but with relatively good conversation skills after finishing the 5-6 years course. Only to check my learning level, I took one of the most renowned tests in Brazil, the Cambridge, and had my Proficiency approved.

Then, I decided to study French, while in College, again in a private course. I fell in love with the French language! In a few months all my journal notes were in French, I spoke to myself in French, and so I remember to develop a good fluency after 2-3 years studying the language. I was highly motivated, always listening to music and trying to sing or at least to sound the lyrics, trying to read French poetry and so on.

After a couple of years, I decided to study Italian in a semi-intensive private course. I made the entire course at the Italian Consulate in Rio in two years, but did not develop fluency, even though I could easily understand much more of Italian than the other languages I have studied before.

I don’t know exactly why, and I would like to ask if you have any guess. Maybe because Italian is very similar to Spanish, that is a language I did not formally studied but which I can read and have a good listening and comprehension because besides being similar to my mother tongue (Portuguese), my father always recited poems in Spanish and we have been listening to Hispanic music during my childhood and adolescence.

English kept being my first studied foreign language, and I had a few chances to practice, mostly reading complex texts on Literature Theory in my Ph.D. courses in Comparative Literature and in a few quick trips to Europe to film festivals, where I spoke basic English to communicate. During my Ph.D. years, I still made some translation from English, French and Spanish to Portuguese on different topics in the Humanities.

Continuing my saga, after around 20 years with rare opportunities to effectively practice any foreign language, I decided to move to the US. Before moving, I took a few months to awaken my English language skills, listening dozens of TED Talks on Education and correlated themes. I made the TOEFL Exam and my grade was not very promising - 81. Just for comparison, my daughter made the TOEFL too, and her final grade was 98.

The highest TOEFL IBT (Internet Based Test) score is 120, among the 4 tested areas, 30 points for each: reading, writing, listening and oral expression (we either listen to oral exercises and also record our voice responding to questions in the test). Even with my poor grade, I was happy that I got what I needed, since UNH defines the minimum accepted grade as 80. Among the US universities I researched, the proficiency requirement range between 70 and 110.

When I arrived in New Hampshire and started the classes in the Education Department Master’s Program, I felt like my English skills did not arise, instead, they seem to have vanished at all! I noticed that I didn’t have vocabulary to say what I wanted to say, and, worse, I didn’t really get the sense of the Professors’ instructions, despite I was understanding all the words and sentences they were saying. 

Since the beginning, I enjoyed the classes, but I was uncomfortable with my lack of ability to express myself. However, in face of the challenge I had voluntarily put myself in, I had no choice but to accept my limitations and try to speak, even sounding like a young child misplaced in a Graduate level class.

Here I am after one year of partial immersion in English (because at home I speak in Portuguese with my children and my husband). There were many funny moments with language issues, and I enjoy being constantly learning in a fast pace while attending to classes, reading a lot and writing in English an insane amount of texts to the courses’ assignments. I am glad I can be a student in this course on Second Language Acquisition, either because I always had many thoughts about L2 learning and because this semester I became a Portuguese Language Faculty at UNH.