if you fear, don't fall but face it !

if you gave up your hope, you fear of expressing yourself in English, you don't know where to head to, let me share my stories to you . believe me, as a second language learners of English, you're not alone, and NEVER alone.

1988: The Same Oven

On another steamy day in the middle of the same semester, I dropped out of my first writing English course for fear of getting an F. The first three returned essays were painted with the teacher’s red pen—a discriminatory device. I got lost in the English academy; I did not know who I could turn to. Frightened, I silently announced a cold war with that writing teacher. From that moment on, every English writing course turned into an academic jail for me; writing teachers paralyzed me even before they showed up in classrooms.

I did not realize that the magic of the grammar books, TOFEL turotials that I drilled in those days had turned pale; the English grammar tests fooled me. I did not realize that the memorization trick failed me; I knew the rules yet I could not write.

1989: The Same Old Oven

A rural girl from a tiny village without electric power until when i was 14, I hated myself when I could not speak fluent English like my Bangkokian peermates who came from international high schools, who were raised abroad, and who were someone we students wanted to be.

On those summer and rainy days, I found a language laboratory to be my sanctuary;
repeating a dialogue with a tape recorder took me to another world and made me forget my realities outside the lab for awhile.

Reading the Bangkok Post newspaper was just too pricy for me to effort. A corner's bookstore thus, a semester later, became my favorite place to play hide and seek with those eyes who kept watching FREE readers (of course, like me). Here, i enjoyed my imagination, i was free from the writing teachers, and i was ME, even for a temporary moment.

That's how a girl next door like me made friends with ENGLISH, the language of others at that time, yet the language of mine now.

What's about you!

note: unfolded aj kob's English literacy