Why I like my English subject

I recently came across many students who confessed that they hate English subject. Come to think about it I was once hated the subject too but not anymore.  What could have changed that?

When I tried to think back, there was one incident during my primary school time that could have changed my perception toward learning the language.  I was from Sekolah Kebangsaan and we usually speak in Chinese and BM in school.  English at that time was not common at all.  We had this weird mindset that those who speak English is just trying to show off, ‘sombong’ some call it ‘action’ but I think most of us were just too afraid of being laughed at if speak wrongly.

All these changed when she came to our school as temporary English Teacher.  It was really so long ago and i wished i can still remember her name.  All I can remember was during one of her English classes, she brought a cassette player and start playing some songs.  We were to copy the lyrics from the blackboard and before we knew it, the whole class started singing, struggling at first with the lyrics, the pronunciation and trying to understand what the song is all about.  We had so much fun singing and we had totally forgotten about our fear of becoming laughing stock because of our bad pronunciation .

And there was another time when she brought us out of the classroom, to learn about instructions on how to make sandwiches…not from textbook but an actual hands-on making real sardine sandwiches and we actually had a picnic after that.

Having said all that, I’m not implying that my English has improved tremendously overnight or I scored A in all my English tests as a results to these, but most importantly, it has changed my negative perception towards learning English.  I paid more attention and I like my English subject.

All these interactive and hands-on ways of learning have definitely worked for me and my classmates back then.  What about you? What works for you?