Hallo everybody!
I’m coming to the end of the last year of University and I’m here to reflect on what and how I’ve learnt, especially in the last few months thanks to the experience of intercultural exchange. I want to focus my attention on how this experience has changed and improved my attitudes about American culture and improved my language skills.
I must admit that my experience of the exchange was not so long, because I started to speak with the American peer more or less only one month ago. However I think that Skype experience was a very useful way to learn something new, but in particular to have a concrete approach with English language. I am convinced that this should have been the real aim of all five years of university. Clearly, it is necessary also to leave with a good background and to know grammatical rules and so on, but what I mean is that the use of a language in the real life is something different, it is like what we did with Corina and during our conversation lessons on Monday.
Moreover the use of a new means of communication helped to create curiosity; skype is like a telephone conversation and I think that without having a person in front of you, you keep more attention to speak correctly. However there is the possibility that the conversation is a little bit boring, if there is not an equal exchange.
In my case it did not happen, because I must say that American people are very open and they have no problem to speak with someone they have never seen before. This is one of the differences that I noticed between American and Italian people, and I’m sure that the reason is cultural. In fact, American people are more modern and independent than us and they used to do a lot of different experiences, far from their own home too, when they are young. Thanks to the exchange and the following editing of the wiki pages, I developed my interest in knowing how you live in another country, which are the value and what is wrong. For example, at the beginning of the semester we spoke about election system in America and I want to say that it has always a tabù for me! It has been very useful to understand how it works and to touch with my own hands how Americans feel this moment, how much it is important for them, but also for all the other countries in the world. This does not happen in Italy…we are really less patriotic than Americans. Moreover I listened to a lot of discourses of the two major candidates and in this way I improved my English knowledge with some new words, and I realized that I am able to follow a native speaker discourse even thought he speaks about more difficult subjects.
Thanks to the final project, I learnt much about American health care system, whose I ignored the mechanism despite of all the telefilms that there are in Italian television. Editing the wiki page for the final project, I also consolidated the notions I learnt during the first semester, in particular I searched for good and updated information in the net, then I tried to be more concise, but clear as possible.
I’m happy because Corina is a student who I can continue to speak English (and also Italian if she wants) with, through Skype, Facebook or simply mails: she is an enormous “opportunity” for me. Even though the process of learning is still long, I know that this year, or rather this part of the course, has really helped me.