My PLE

After years of language learning each of us develops their own strategies and methods according to their abilities and frame of mind. I personally need different kinds of environment, depending on the type of skill I want to train. For instance, writing needs time and concentration, therefore I have to be in a room on my own, possibly in silence or with some background music. In this case my sources are going to be dictionaries, personal notes and textbooks. When it comes to listening instead, I turn to the internet and search for podcasts, listen to the radio or watch a film in the original language. Like we all know, language is primarily an interactive activity, therefore having a contact with mother-tongue speakers is fundamental to me. There are various ways of making the most of this possibility, some are offered by university, some rely on our personal acquaintances. Not only can we learn from our teachers, but also from our colleagues and friends from abroad. This obviously includes travels, both as holidays and as study programmes and also part-time jobs or short internships.
Building a mind map of my PLE helped me to put in order all these tools, and I find it astonishing how many sources we can exploit to have a first-hand contact with another language. By checking it every now and then, one can reorganize it and see what really helps and what can be simply “left aside” because it’s not suitable to our study method.

Final comments on the exchange

This semester we had the occasion to do this exchange with Dikinson university and so to compare our way of perceiving life with that of people living in another continent. The main result of this exchange, to me, was to rethink some topics regarding different aspects of everyday life. Some things that are pretty obvious for us like the actual situation in the Italian society appears totally unknown to people from other countries, who see things from another perspective. Something that particularly stroke was that Dikinson students thought that “raccomandazioni” corresponded to “recommendations”, that is to a positive feedback a teacher gets. The single fact that there is no such concept in English – and therefore no word for it – means that the phenomenon itself doesn’t exist. Then another topic I found interesting was health care. Actually, I didn’t think it was so hotly debated in the US and that Americans feel like this system no longer works. If comparing ourselves with another culture implies to broaden our horizons, then this experience has certainly been a success.

Immigration in Italy

If only we could turn back the hands of time...

Unfortunately that's not possible, and today we're paying the consequences of some disastrous decisions made in the last 15 years. And now the situation is really critical. If you simply decide to take a stroll around Padova after sunset, you'll see that the number of Italians around has drastically decreased. At every corner - even near the city center - you find people from almost every part of the world, doing what? Well, dealing illegal substances, checking out that their "protette" are doing their job properly, looking for cars to steal and so on and so forth. The result is that common citzens have lost their freedom to go out and, personally, I would never ever walk alone near Stanga or Portello; you seriously risk to get robbed, or even worse. Therefore, people are starting to feel they're invaded and they've lost their freedom in their own country. They're angrier and definetely less tolerant than what they used to be. Surprisingly, the presence of more immigrants has led to a less open attitute towards them.

Why have we got to this point? Because of the basically wrong attitude towards this issue; because it is an issue and not just a global phenomenon tout court. In the early 90's it seemed that immigration could be a source for our country: in fact, Italians were aiming at higher social positions, thus refusing to do more "humble" jobs. Immigrants should have filled in this gap. What happened instead? That a number of people started to come to Italy, hoping to have a better life, but even a higher number simply decided to come here and scratch a living - most of the times in a pretty doubtful way. Every year, our government would plan to welcome a certain amount of immigrants, according to the need of industries. The thing is that our frontiers were not controlled enough, so that many people entered the country illegally. They would live on their wits and it all went on without much control.

Now, multiply all this for 15 years and what you get is today's situation. Moreover, the government didn't work out any project to help these people integrate in our society. What we would have needed is a gradual process: to let few people enter the country, so that they could find a place in the system, and Italians would have had the means and the time to accept them. After all, we are creatures of habit and don't like radical changes.

Whenver we switch on our tv, we see all these people standed on our Southern costs. They flee from the first aid centers and most of the time the police cannot track them any more. How long will this continue for? Why do we let them in if then we know they won't go out if they break the law? It's high time that things changed; the right of Italians and of honest immigrants to have their freedom should be finally granted.

Skype exchange about elections

Due to some serious technical probelms, our skype exchange of this week was very short. This time the discussion was held with Michelle for the Dickinson group and Veronica, Silvia and me for the Padova group. This week's topic was the approaching of elections in Italy and the campaign in the U.S.

Michelle said she has seen Berlusconi's and Veltroni's promotional videos. Well, her reaction was very similar to ours. She said it was a brainwashing experience. The first song "meno male che Silvio c'è" sounds like a religious song - and I must say I had exactly the same impression - and the people involved have a very unnatural attitude. The second wasn't any better: the song is catchy (although not a very original choice, I think) and it is quite evident that its purpose is to look positive and full of hope of a better and "shining future". Can you think about a bigger lie?

I think she got the point of our political crisis when she asked something we've been asking ourselves too: why do we say we don't like certain politicians and then we keep voting them? Well, unfortunately the answer is absurdely simple: because we don't have any valid alternative. Candidates are always the same, no way of getting rid of them because power is only a big cake to share.

Skype exchange with Martina and Marigny

My latest skype exchange was with Martina and Marigny, and our main topic was politics, with a particular attention to the election campaigns both in Italy and in the U.S. The second part of the conversation was on our future perspectives and the connection between politics and “meritocrazia” in the public administration.
First thing, we asked the American girl about her personal opinion on politics. She said she doesn’t like it and we all agreed on the fact that the Bush administration has been some kind of failure, mainly because of the war in Iraq. She doesn’t really know who she’s going to vote for and thinks the campaign is still open. I told her about the video “Obama girl” (unfortunately she hadn’t seen it), and we drew a comparison with Berlusconi’s and Veltroni’s promotional videos. The general impression is that they are all very similar, after all: they use catchy jingles and try to appeal to all social categories, thus appearing democratic and deeply concerned in the future of their country. What annoyed me the most about Obama’s video was the exploiting of the image of an appealing girl just to gain votes. Because of this ridiculous approach to politics, I have the strong feeling that all candidates strongly believe they can fool electors very easily; I personally feel they’re trying to make fun of me – actually in a very naive way. All the three of us share the discontent towards these people – no matter what party they belong to – because it seems all they care about is power and money.
As Marigny studies psychology, she would like to work with children in the future, and help them out when they have problems either at school or with their parents. Martina wishes she could become a “cultural mediator” for the "provincia". We needed to explain what that means in Italian because both terms sounded unknown to her. A cultural mediator is supposed to help foreign people to get integrated in our culture and to learn more about its institutions. The term provincia indicates an administrative unit inside each region, which has specific competences. Martigny was particularly surprised to hear that one needs to have certain conections if he wants to be hired in a public instituion like the provincia or regione. Again, the problem is that politics and public administation are too closely related, thus preventing capable people to get a good job and help their community.

Developing intercultural competence

When one fully realizes that language and culture can be seen as the two sides of the same coin, it's time to start to take a closer look at both. We can imagine it as a journey and each stop as a new idea that we can put in our bag and make ours. Stop by stop our understanding of the other's culture will become ever deeper and more complete.

This is the aim of the YOGA programme: to assess our intercultural communicative competence. The good thing about this form is that it helps us to focus on some specific issues, i.e. awareness attitude, skills, knowledge and language proficiency. In my opinion, being conscious of what we have been doing so far and at which stage of the process of learning we are can be the right attitude to improve ourselves.

The big challenge, though, is that not only do we need to become aware of what we can do but also endeavour our abilities to cope with another cultural ambience. The key to that is our will to know and learn more about it, and at the same time to be constantly ready to modify our opinions on it. Moreover, we should not forget that the observation of another culture always includes the critical observation of ourselves and of our way of living.

Second skype conversation

Due to the absence of my usual partner Rachel, this time I skyped with Ashley (who found herself without a partner too). As it was our first talk, we started by introducing ourselves. So I found out that she is in her first year and her major is archeology. Our first topic was the Easter (or spring) break: she asked me what people usually do on Easter Monday. I explained that we meet up with our friends and take a trip to the hills around Padova, we play soccer, eat, drink and, above all, have a good time!

We had the occasion to compare comedy in the English and Italian culture through two milestones of this genre: on the one hand Monty Python and on the other hand the "Fantozzi" series. Because the English series is almost unknown in Italy and viceversa, we came to the conclusion that comedy is deeply culture-bound and, therefore, people from different countries laugh in different ways. I suggested Ashely that she should take a look at what's available on youtube regarding the most famous "ragioniere" of the 80's. Being a cult series, I think it can be a good occasion to deepen her knowledge of Italian culture. Hope she enjoyed it.