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<title> Evaluation </title>
My reason for choosing to study English is that I believe that at this stage I can't learn more by myself. I have to go to England or study it at the university. My greatest weakness of the "four skills" of listening, reading, speaking and writing is writing tightly followed by speaking, this is because I know English mostly by reading and listening to lectures.

I have been studying economics at Uppsala university for four years and the main part of the literature for the courses is in American English. Therefore I believe that my reading skills are not to bad. I do love reading novels and read a couple a week, this unfortunately interferes with my studies. As I mostly read science fiction and fantasy and these books seldom are translated, I almost always read in American English. My favourite authors are Neal Stevenson and Charles de Lint. When reading in English I prefer 19th century authors like Jane Austen and Mrs Gaskell. This may have resulted in my English glossary being somewhat strange.

Listening to and understanding spoken English is more difficult than reading but it is getting easier all the time. My D-level thesis tutor Gary Jordan was American. I discovered the mistake after I had been accepted for the course and thought that I might benefit from it after all. Understanding spoken English were essential for the thesis so I got used to listening carefully. It was during this course that I discovered that I really need to do something for my English, especially as my tutor continually was correcting my tendency write where instead of were. My understanding of English is worse, I'll probably have to watch a couple of Monte Python films to repair it, or it will get better during this course as some of the teachers are English. It is slightly embarrassing that it is easier for me to understand a Spanish person speaking English than a person from England. I discovered this when I was 16 and spent a fortnight at a riding camp in Wellington, I couldn't understand a word during the first days.

Unfortunately when listening to English one usually have to answer in English. It is difficult trying to figure out which is worse my grammar or my pronunciation, but as it probably is easier to understand bad grammar I'll say the pronunciation is worse. During my reading of novels I have acquired a lot of words that I firstly don't know the exact meaning of and secondly have no idea how to pronounce and as I still use them this is a problem. My accent is definitely neither American nor English but probably Swenglish or something else entirely. The greatest problem with my grammar is probably the placing of the is and are as this is something you really should be able to cope with. The result is that I often have to refrain from communicating an opinion only because I realise that I cannot figure out the sentence, this is irritating especially if I have already started the sentence and have to refrain from finishing it.

My problem with grammar probably shows more in my writing than in my spoken English, but one never know. The main problem with writing is otherwise the composition of the sentences and the text. The sentences tend to be long and rambling with a lot of commas, when I correct this the text usually loses it's fluency. The text is usually also hard to follow as I skip from one subject to another and have explanations that are impossible to follow in between. My writing in Swedish is the same but the explanations get even more impossible to follow in English. This is also something I discovered during the writing my thesis. At this moment I'm starting to discover that the language and form in this essay isn't very formal, but it is probably to late to correct that now. 

I would like to acquire correct grammar and an English or mid Atlantic accent, but to get a nice accent that doesn't sound ridiculous I'll probably have to live in England for several years. So I'll settle for speaking English with some fluency, grammar that is mostly correct and a pronunciation that an Englishman or an American can understand. That is my goal in learning English and this course is the first step towards reaching that goal.
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