...Looking back at my PLE...

Hello people!
Well, I thought it was finished, but actually we are yet to have our finest hour:-) In fact, we have not talked about our PLE anymore, and I do agree that it might be interesting to see how it has developed during these months. So I stepped back to my oldest posts and had a look at my mindmap…The first thing I noticed was that no big changes took place, although I cannot say my PLE is exactly the same as six months ago.

If I had to draw my mindmap again, I would keep the main division between my learning at university and outside it. As I explained in class, I am convinced that what we learn at university is not enough to reach a high level in English (of course I am not saying it useless or unimportant!). Unfortunately, we usually have large numbers so if we really want to practice the language we have to do it by ourselves. I would also keep the division into the four branches which correspond to the four different abilities. They are clearly not the same so I think they should be considered independent parts of a whole. I mean, you can be very good at writing but extremely bad at speaking or vice versa. Personally, I still feel more confident in writing than in speaking or listening, although thanks to the exchange I had the chance to practice a lot ;-)

As regards my learning at university, I think that this semester the comments on my peers’ blogs did not play such a big role as in the first part of the year. Furthermore, the ‘Padova-Albany’ forum disappeared from my mindmap, or better, it was replaced by the ‘Padova-Dickinson’ forum :-)
In the section called ‘tools’ there have been no significant changes: I still use both 'bloglines' and 'delicious' and I had already been using 'Skype' for a while before starting the exchange. However, this semester I got to know other two useful tools to keep in touch with my peers and foreign friends: 'MySpace' and 'Facebook'. Another important source of learning was of course our WIKI PAGE; it was a great occasion to practice my writing skills but also my ability to work in group. I know it may sound trivial, but organizing and planning some work together with other people is something we will surely have to do in our future job… And we’d better learn to do it now since it is far from being easy :-) That is why I think that working in group has been a fundamental part of my PLE lately.

I think people still play the most important role when it comes to communicate in English in my free time. Over the last months I had the chance to ‘meet’ new foreign friends I can practice with (I am talking about my American peer as well) and I am really happy about it. As I stressed when I presented my PLE, we do need people if we want to speak the language. We must get some kind of feedback; we cannot just talk to ourselves in front of the mirror (that would not be so fun I guess!). The only possible way to improve our speaking skills is meeting non-native speakers of Italian (I know it is extremely useful to talk in English also during class with our peers, but it is quite awkward as we are all native speakers of the same language).

In the next future I hope I my mindmap will keep growing… And I am not only talking about languages. At this time next year I will be probably (and hopefully!) working…And God knows how many new things I will have to learn then…

Lately I have been thinking about the meaning of the word “learning”, and I have realized I have always associated it with school/university rather than with the world of work. No need to explain that I was quite wrong… ;-)

Ok, that’s all folks. Good luck for your exams and have a nice summer!

Last post about "Intercultural Competence"

Hi there!
I have not written on this blog for a while and, sad but true, this is probably going to be my last post :-(
The semester has almost finished, so it is time to sit down and reflect on what I have been learning during these months.

The main ‘topic’ in this second part of the year has been intercultural competence and we tried to ‘gain’ it somewhere doing an exchange with an American university.
As I wrote on my mid-term paper, I was actually a little bit disappointed about the exchange we did in winter… Of course it was nobody’s fault if it did not work out properly, but I must say I felt as we had missed a great opportunity. That is why I did not have great expectations when we gave it another try at the beginning of March. To tell the truth, I was not very optimist as I had always experienced that native speakers of English are not so interested in getting to know other cultures… They come from the so-called 'dominating culture', they speak the language that the entire world has to speak… So it is quite obvious that they are usually less motivated than us.

But this time things have been COMPLETELY different. First of all, the Americans were students of Italian so they were also willing to practice a foreign language. Then I think I was very lucky since my peer was really eager to know Italy and the Italian way of living better; she had a lot of enthusiasm and always did her best to speak Italian whenever possible. I had a wrong idea of the attitude Americans had towards other cultures, and that led me to have a wrong attitude towards them sometimes. Now I have learnt that they are not all SO proud: they can be very open-minded, and accepting this fact I have learnt to be more open-minded as well.

During these months my knowledge about life in the States has improved significantly. Now I know more about college life, politics and crucial social issues as health-care system and illegal immigration. It was a great chance to hear the opinion of someone who actually lives there… Much better than just believing to what we get from the media. I hope my peer could learn something from me, too, even though sometimes it was hard to answer to her very specific questions about Italian politics ;-) In fact, I think this period was useful for ‘revising’ some history of my own country as well (and also to learn things I had very little knowledge about).

As reagards language, I know it is only a small part of intercultural competence, but I think it played a fundamental role in my exchange experience. I must say I am thoroughly satisfied of my progress in spoken English. When I decided to skype in my spare time, I was a little bit worried because I knew that things would be more difficult to organize… And that was partially true, especially when it came to work on our final project. Anyway, I also learnt to appreciate the fact that there were just two of us in our group(Stefania joined us only at the end of April). That meant talking a lot in English and Italian; I think Sharon and I were maybe the only ones who had the chance to speak half an hour in English and half an hour in Italian every week. I was very happy about it since speaking is the skill I needed to practice most. I know it is still going to be a long way till I can say my English is really fluent, but I am sure there have been significant improvements :-)

Finally, I would like to thank all my peers I had the pleasure to work with over this year. I feel I have learnt a lot from them, and, above all, I have learnt to know them and their opinions better. Moreover, I would like to thank Sarah: all this would not have been possible without her enthusiasm and hard work. Yea, the course was quite time-demanding and there was often a lot of stuff to do… But now I am convinced it was worth it.

Mmm… I must admit I feel a little bit sorry now that the course has finished… It has never happened to me before… weird feeling… ;-)

BYE!!

Sixth Skype exchange/Wiki Page

Hi everybody!

Yesterday I spoke with Sharon about our FINAL PROJECT. As I have already written here, we would like to concentrate on illegal immigration in Italy and the USA. We realized that the topic is rather 'wide' so we decided to narrow it a little bit and focuse on the attitude which people and media show towards this issue.

Our Wiki page will be divided into 5 sections:

1. PART ONE: INTRODUCTION (Eleonora, English/Italian)

• What is 'illegal immigration'? (in general)
• About Group 16. Here I will put all our contacts (email addresses, Skype names, TAG used in del.icio.us....), so that if we need some information we will find it here :-)

2. PART TWO: THE ISSUE IN AMERICA (Stefania, English)

• General information about 'illegal immigration' in the USA: numbers (how many illegal immigrants are there in the US more or less?), nationalities (where do they mostly come from?), places (are there some specific States/areas where we find illegal immigrants?)
• Media's/people's opinion: in this section we could put two links (a forum and an article taken from an American newspaper) and see what people and media 'think' about illegal immigrants...And of course, we will try to understand WHY they have that particular attitude towards them :-)

3. PART THREE: THE ISSUE IN ITALY (Sharon, Italian)

• See above (PART TWO). These two parts should be as parallel as possible, so I think we'd better follow the same pattern for both of them. Of course, this section will concentrate on 'illegal immigration' in Italy...So the forum will be in Italian and the article taken from an Italian newspaper :-)

4. PART FOUR: COMPARISON BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES (Eleonora, English and Italian)

• Differencies and similarities in the two countries.
• Conclusion

5. PART FIVE: REFERENCES (Bibliography)

• Here we'll put all the URLs of the websites we got material from...:-)

Of course, we can add pictures, videos (and captions) or anything else!

Hope this is clear enough,

SEE YOU!

Fifth Skype exchange

Hi everybody!
After having spent the last weeks talking about politics and elections, this time we focused on another crucial issue: immigration.
As I wrote on the previous post, Sharon and I had already discussed briefly about it, but on Tuesday we went deeper into the matter and learnt more about this phenomenon in the two countries.

I must say it was quite an interesting conversation as the word 'immigration' has a very different meaning in Italy and USA. In the States basically everybody comes from somewhere else: let’s look for example at our peers at Dickinson. Most of them have foreign origins and their grandparents were often immigrants. America was born thanks to immigrants: they left their own countries, they settled in the ‘New Continent’, started a new life there and contributed to its economic growth. Therefore, it is pretty obvious that Americans and Italians usually have a different attitude towards immigration.
As Sarah said, Italy has known this issue only for the past 10-15 years. Traditionally, Italy was a ‘country of emigrants’ and only at the beginning of the 90’s it really turned into a ‘country of immigrants’. Sometimes I have the impression we still have to get used to different cultures living in the same place…And probably our politicians are not yet used to that, either, since they often have not been able to deal properly with immigration over these years.
On the contrary, America is well-known as a big melting pot where people from about 50 different nationalities live and work together. As I wrote before, many of them were born in the States, but there are also a lot of foreigners who move to the US to find a job and start a better life.

Unfortunately, it is not always easy for all of them to integrate in the American society. Sharon told me at the time they are having serious problems especially with Mexicans. They often cross the border without visa and documents, they do not speak English so all they can do to survive is selling drugs or robbing. This leads some Americans to have strong prejudices against them and sometimes to take advantage of them, too. In fact, above all in California Mexicans are usually discriminated and are forced to do the worst jobs for very low wages.
I told Sharon we are also having big problems especially with gypsies since they are very difficult to integrate (and maybe they did not want to, either). I am sure not all of them are criminals, nor I think they should all be sent away; but undoubtedly, their culture is so different from ours that it is hard to see a solution for this problem. I would not ask them to give up their traditions, it would be enough if they sent their children to school instead of let them begging and robbing on the streets.

When there are integration problems, there is less tolerance and racism is more likely to spread. Unfortunately, every now and then in both countries we still hear stories of natives who beat or insult immigrants; in the US, this happens more often in Southern States, where Mexicans and black people are sometimes discriminated.

After our long conversation, we came up with the conclusion that legal immigration is a precious source of work and cultural richness for our countries. The real problem is illegal immigration.
It is a problem for both the ‘host-country’ and the immigrants themselves, who often have to decide between breaking the law and starving. At the moment this is a crucial point in Italy as well as in America, so that is why we decided to concentrate on this issue in our final project.

I hope it all goes well and that you will find it interesting ;-)

See you!

Immigration

As soon as I began to think what I could write on this post, I realized I did not know much about the rules which regulate immigration in Italy. Of course, I remembered that the law called “Turco-Napolitano” had been substituted by “Bossi-Fini”, which had partially been changed by Prodi’s government. But I just had a faint idea of how they dealt with this issue, so I looked for more information on the Web and I found the following links (in Italian):

• Legge Bossi-Fini
• DDL Amato-Ferrero

The whole system seems quite complicated; what is clear is that every immigrant must have a job before coming to Italy, otherwise he/she cannot get the permission to stay here. The “Bossi-Fini” law provoked a lot of discussion since it was much more restrictive than the previous one (“Turco-Napolitano”). Moreover, I found out that it was also criticized by Amnesty International because it did not grant political asylum as it should have done according to international laws. Amato and Ferrero, who were part of Prodi's government, tried to cut the red tape for high-qualified foreigners and postponed the expiry date of work visas.

I think Italy does need immigrants. This is not just my opinion, it is simply a well- known fact. Take a look at this:

• L'immigrazione in Italia

Italy’s population grows thanks to foreign families. In 2004 immigrants paid taxes for 1.87 billion €; in 2005 they contributed to our GDP for 6.1%.
Just yesterday evening I heard on TV that Italian small companies cannot find plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, hairdressers, tailors and carpenters. In these fields there are a lot of jobs available, but it seems that Italians prefer studying or working in offices rather than “using their hands”. That is why artisans' associations are thinking to ask for workers coming from abroad; the same has already happened with nurses and caregivers.
I also think that immigrants who live, work and pay taxes here should have the right to vote. I have got one friend who was born in Romania but has been living here since he was 13. He attended the high school here, he has been working for an Italian company and paying taxes to the Italian state for almost 10 years now. Despite this, he cannot decide who he wants to be governed by because he does not have the Italian citizenship. I do not know how it works in other European countries, but honestly I find the situation here quite absurd.

The real problem is illegal immigration. I read Enrico’s post and I agree with him when he says that an illegal immigrant cannot do anything legal… So it is quite obvious that when you are desperate, you just end up robbing or trafficking in drugs if you want to survive.
I think the government should be more strict with people who break the law, no matter if foreigners or Italians. Gypsies who steal in houses or rape women MUST be punished as well as Italians who drive when they are drunk and crash against other cars. You make a mistake, you pay for it. It sounds quite simple, so why does it seem something impossible here?

Good question…

Ok, I will stop now :-)
See you on Monday!