6. ENGLISH LANGUAGE CHALLENGES

Before entering university I had very little to do with English, so when thinking about my academic future I never contemplated the idea of having English. It is as if my brain voluntarily and unconsciously decided to ignore the subject. That is why the English test that measures the level of command of the language took me by surprise, I saw that I had to take it and I did not think much about it and I started the test at the same moment. I didn't even manage to answer all the questions, and half (or maybe more) of the ones I answered were random.

Now that I am here, I have the feeling that I know a little more English than before, maybe I learned more this semester than last semester. Without a doubt, having English in person is very different from having it online, in a way the physical space and the pressure of being in person pressures us to learn in one way or another. In this sense, it is good to have the feeling of having learned something even when I didn't feel like doing anything. 

Another thing that happened to me while studying English was that I encountered new and participatory learning methodologies. I have mainly seen a lot of paired (or more than one) activities and blogs. In the case of the former, I think it's fun, it also helped me to get to know one or another classmate; I almost never manage to have a decent dialogue in English with another classmate, but eventually you learn. 

In the case of blogs, I find them to be an interesting way of confronting students with English, although I also find them to be a dynamic very typical of American or Western culture, I don't know. What is certain is that it short-circuits me when the teaching of a language is infused with the culture of the nation that speaks the language the most, or the one most known to speak it. Language hegemony. I don't know if this is something that must necessarily occur in order to teach and learn a language, but I question it on more than one occasion lately.

As for my relationship outside the classroom with English, I think it exists almost solely in my obsession with having to watch all movies or audiovisual content in its original language (whenever possible), and is related to the fact that there is too much content in English, probably more than in other languages (obviating Spanish).