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This is an essay about my weaknesses and strengths in the knowledge and skills of the English language. I am going to try to evaluate my abilities in speaking, listening, reading, and writing. 
The first thing I should tell the reader is that I am a very social, spontanous and curious person and I like talking and to get to know new people. I think this plays an important part for me especially in the speaking and listening skills. I think these skills improved very much by the time I spent in Great Britain. Firstly my ability to explain what I mean even if I don't know the exact word, got much better. This is useful when my vocabulary isn't sufficient enough. How big vocabulary you have depend who you compare with. Of course it would be better if I knew more words but on the other hand it is good to be able to speak around the words as well. Secondly I believe I got a much better pronunciation, although I think I lost some of in the years after I came back. Part of the reason for the improvement is because I am very easily influenced by a language, spoken around me. This is not always good since it makes it difficult to change between languages and it also makes it very difficult to be aware of my pronunciation.

My social personality makes me both a better and worse listener. I am a good listener because I am really intressted in most people and in what they have to say. What I said above about vocabulary I should think also applies here. Furthermore I think that I have quite a good awareness of the links between language and culture, but I think it would be intressting to know more about this. I also know a little bit about the culture and society itsself; especially the Brittish. 
In addition I would like to be better at interpreting what people mean tacitly and I need to aquire more patience to improve my skill of listening. 

My skills in reading are actually also correlated to my sociality. Although you practically don't meet the author and the book's characters, some kind of encounter do take place when you read a good book. (I am not so sure about the bad ones.) Anyhow my skills in reading of English texts is probably influenced very much by the fact that I have read a lot of different kind of texts in Swedish. I am a very fluent reader in English, a text could contain a lot of words that I either haven't heard of before or that belong to my passiv vocabulary, this is because I am fairly good at understanding the words in their context and above all at reading the overall context itself. I have problems when its too many words that I don't understand, when I have to get a detailed knowledge of the content of the text and when the text is written in another type of English than brittish English. 

The fourth of our communicative and social skills is writing and this is the activity I dislike most of them. It takes a lot more work and time to do this and also its the most demanding because people expect more of you in writing than in the other skills. I am not good in writing in a formal sort of way. All this linking in paragraphing is something that I need more training in. Neither am I any good at grammar so I am not aware of special grammar-points while I am writing. When writing it is probably more important than any other time that you have a big active vocabulary, but it is also the point where it is easier than otherwise to look up words and phrases. I am working on both the vocabulary and the grammar, to become better at looking up rules and spelling. Besides this I am really quite good in writing, especially essays.

Finally, I am looking forward to the spring, to get better in English and to eventually initiate my pupils to this wonderful and intriguing language. The challenge lies ahead....
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