Community College. I started this process few months after arriving to the USA. But as everything in this world has its end so my studying ESL is close to be finished. It was a hard but definitely useful work. And this work has a result. The result is my very positive feeling that it would be possible for me to enjoy the luxury of human communication in English too. It is possible to understand fluent English and to be understandable for native English speakers. It is sure possible. Maybe not in the current life, but it’s possible.
Many instructors have taught me during those years. I’ve got good grades in most classes and being an experienced student I think that now would be a good moment to evaluate my English instructors. Unfortunately, I’m not able to do that in detail for all of them because of time and space limitations. Trust me, please, all of them are very good and I really appreciate their efforts. If nevertheless somebody would ask me to name some names I can’t refrain from mentioning three of them: Barbara Jordan, Charles Adolevsky and Julie Schlafer.
I really don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but
Barbara Jordan is absolutely the best. Not even due to her professional skills, though they definitely are excellent, but because of the main feature of her teaching. This main feature of her teaching style is the fact that she evidently enjoys this process and it makes us, her students, enjoys it too. She adjusts her teaching to different student’s levels even in one class, she checks everybody understands and is ready to help all the time. Mrs. Jordan’s classes are not only useful for English, they are really interesting. During teaching English Grammar, Writing and Speaking she was giving us a lot of information about American culture, history, political life and appropriate way of behavior in American society – many topics she touched on in class were extremely useful for us, immigrants, in understanding the American way of life. Her life experience and her sense of humor make always interesting to know her original and deep opinion in any topic.
Julie Schlafer is a very educated person: she has a Master of teaching ESL and a Doctor of music, and currently she is not only teaching ESL but playing symphony and chambers concerts with such a grand instrument as bassoon! The richness of her personality is apparent in class too. Ms. Schlafer’s teaching performances are as excellent as her musical ones (I know it because saw both). She is involved in a teaching all the time in class, from first second to the last one she is doing her job and makes every student do theirs too. She switches our activity in class by different ways for making us repeating, repeating in class, repeating using WebCT – she is online many times a day so we could get an answer to any question in no longer than in couple of hours. Due to this intensive process even complicated Grammar forms remained trace in our brains (even if-clauses).
Charles Adolevsky taught me in my first ESL class – it was Listening and Speaking. Now, after the years, I understand how lucky I was having just Mr. Adolevsky as instructor in my first class in MCC. Everybody who has anything to do with international communication should understand how difficult it is to force not native English speakers to open our mouth and say anything. Indeed it is so hard when you have to have time to interpret any word inside your head, recognize it, and translate back the answer. And after all this efforts be not understandable to your partner in conversation because of your accent, wrong stress, wrong grammar, etc. Mr. Adolevsky has understood it very well. He pushed us to speak by different ways: loud reading, conversations, disputes, public speaking and finally it worked. He has unlimited patience and unlimited friendliness. Very friendly atmosphere always reigned in his class and it was his main way to help us begin to speak.
And finally I’d like to repeat that I’m boundlessly thankful to all my ESL instructors with no exceptions. If you find here too many mistakes it’s not a reason for you not to believe how good I was taught by my ESL instructors. Opposite, if I haven’t had such good ESL teachers you can’t even imagine how many mistakes would be here.