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<title> Finding out the truth about us </title>
What would life be without speaking? Enormously lonely and boring, colorless and sad. All over the world people use their speaking abilities to show love, express their feelings, ask the way, impress, encourage, make others laugh or bore us to death.
We learn how to speak while we grow up. In the meantime we are being influenced by our environment, such as our family, friends and the society we're living in.
Our abilities to communicate - by speaking or writing - have nowadays developed to an ever increasing extent. In our computerized society it's usually taken for granted that almost everyone can write or speak in public, and it's easy to believe that writing and speaking abilities are inborn in some people. They can express themselves elegantly without being nervous at all. The relieving truth is that nobody has got it as a gift from the above. It's all about conscious work. Almost everybody can learn how to write well or to speak publicly.
I've always considered writing and speaking as the skills of playing an instrument or riding and driving. In some cases it's about performing certain actions. Those actions must be practiced until they can be performed automatically. In a word: You choose to act according to a pattern achieved by experience.
I've learned this at my early ages. Being born and raised in a minority within a majority completely different in religion, culture and language enabled me to improve my flexibility in writing and speaking. Later on a third language came along, too: English. Totally different in structure from the other two ones.
I began studying English at secondary school and I loved it. I felt it close to my heart and soon decided to go further with my studies, so I started at a very high-class institute called Iran-America Language Institute, with teachers all educated from the U.S.. I was so soon absorbed in their system, that I started considering to become a teacher. Unfortunately, there was more emphasis on speaking rather than on writing, due to which I feel a great weakness in writing.
In Sweden apart from the school English I started a Cambridge course for the FCE and CAE, but once again I didn't find it effective to improve my writing skills. My speaking, on the other hand, due to my several long visits in the States has been remarkably improved.
In general, I have a great confidence in myself to handle this English course at the University in the best way. To improve my free production skills, it's important to have knowledge about the working process and the correct patterns, as it's necessary to know what rules to follow in different communicating situations.
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