To be honest,
I used to think that English at university won’t do any change on my English
level, but I have improved it, especially at speaking (discounting isolated
experiences, I have never had the opportunity to speak English like at this
subject). Blogs also helped me to express myself. In summary, English have helped
me a lot in communication abilities. In another hand, relative to reading
ability, I have learned a lot of that from papers that I have to read for my career
(I use English in that cases, of 100% of things that I have to read maybe the
10% is in English, last semester was like 30%) I’ve improved a lot my lecture
comprehension doing that exercise that, at the beginning, was very difficult.
At first months I couldn’t understand English papers very well, I could only
catch isolated ideas. Now I can understand papers almost totally, so I’m happy
about that. I still have to improve my listening ability, I can understand English
at exercise or at classroom because is more slowly, but sometimes at movies
without subtitles I can’t understand everything.
I think that English subject that this University has is not a bad subject, but maybe is not focused in the right way. I mean, at communication abilities It performs very well that objective. Communication abilities are important and crucial because English is the global language. But, relative to reading comprehension in more difficult levels (that is the ability that we’re using for the other subjects), there’s no preoccupation, and I know that is not fault of professors, but of the English department planning. There are a lot of classmates that can’t read papers at English, and they have to wait for people who translate them. At Diego Portales University, English subject is focused depended on the abilities that careers needs. For example, at political science, obligatory English subject is focused on reading comprehension and if they choose International Relationships on the following years, they have to take an English subject that is focused on communication abilities.
