At the English lesson

Usually I sit at the first desk in front of the blackboard. On my right is my friend Andrew. Two student-girls are behind us. The other students sit on our left. We like English, that’s why everybody is always present at the lesson.

English is one of the general subjects at our University. At the lessons we talk and discuss things, read and write, we also listen to tape recordings and see different films. We read and translate texts, write and translate words, sentences, ask and answer questions, agree or disagree with the teacher. Sometimes we listen to short texts then we retell them. We also do a lot of exercises at home. Before doing an exercise I read a new rule in the text-book and learn it. The text-book gives us a lot of examples and this helps us to do the exercise correctly.

Our teacher explains to us difficult things. She listens to the students and corrects the students’ mistakes in reading, retelling and translation. I am happy that I can also speak English a little. I have a lot of work to do every day. I have some difficulty with the pronunciation but I haven’t much difficulty with spelling. The tape-recorder and the videotape-recorder are of great help to us. Our students are never absent from the English classes, we prepare carefully for them and the teacher is pleased with our knowledge. From lesson to lesson we improve our knowledge, learn more and more new words, grammatical structures and put them into practice of speaking.

I must say that learning a foreign language is not an easy thing. It is a long and slow process that takes a lot of time and efforts. One should say that English is not an easy language to learn. There is a big problem of spelling, of the large number of exceptions to any rule. But I want to know foreign languages because I have always been interested in foreign countries, their cultures and peoples. I want to learn English in particular not only because it is the language of such great countries as the USA and Great Britain, but also because it has become the international language, the language of progressive science and engineering. To know English today is absolutely necessary for every educated man, for every good specialist.

UNIT 3