Role of English Language

The Role of English Language in My Life



The Role of English Language in My Life

Introduction

The term universal language is referred to as a language that is accepted, understood and spoken by most of the world's population. Language is said to be one of the biggest barriers and so many believe that if everyone shared a common language, the world would have few misapprehensions and fewer conflicts (Hamil, 1982, p. 81-83). The universal language English is the world's second largest innate language that is spoken, and it is an official language in 70 countries. Factually speaking, there are high numbers of people who speak Chinese due to nationality but geographically speaking English has a wide spread reach (www.foxnomad.com).

English being one of the widely-used international languages of the world, learning English language was an interesting journey for me. I as a native Russian's endeavour to learn English started from my school times. Since childhood, television has been one of my favourite sources of entertainment and English being a universal media language as well stirred interest. English was the language of cinema, dramas, cartoons and news.

My basic understanding of English developed through watching such sources of entertainment. In my school times, one of the courses that I was enthusiastic about was English. Although I always used to go under trial and error stage, but I never lost interest like other class mates that I had. In fact, such stage of failure boosted my morale to a greater extent.

In the early stages of secondary schooling when I was about 12, my basics of English language were firmly formed. We use to have a 40 minutes class along with homework based on learning vocabulary and grammar. I still recall retaining a variety of verbs through endless repetition. The ideal situation was that once I learned a new word I could hear it on television, as well. That was the sole reason that I learnt English quicker then Russian which I learnt at the same time.

Grade 1-2

Besides the fact, that I learnt to use the right tense, the difficult part for us Russian students were to put tenses to use verbally. A simple present tense would not exactly translate into the same tense in Russian language. We were taught the rules and regulations of when and how to use a particular tense. We normally use to learn though application and not theoretically. Every week we were given the task to learn and adapt to unfamiliar vocabulary and then we were asked to use the unfamiliar words learnt into sentences. We had to learn 10 unfamiliar words every week which undoubtedly helped us verbally.

I realized one crucial lesson from my teacher at that time, regarding studious attitude. She used to make me read the exercises that I was supposed to do for homework. The homework consisted of exercises which required me to fill in the correct word. When I was made to re-read the solution, it was apparent that I did not understand ...