Merry Christmas...again!

Have a look at this video...It's amazing!

Merry Christmas to you!

Martina

Merry Christmas!

I wish you all a MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Martina

Do you like karaoke?

Hi, girls!
Last week we spoke about how tools -like YouTube- could help us in our language learning. We all pointed out that YouTube is often used for stupid purposes and for this reason some of us were sceptic about its usefulness for language learning. Well, I think that it depends on how you use it. In fact YouTube is a wide source for us!
Have a look at what I found. I like this song sooo much! I like its melody and the guitar. Do you like karaoke? Well, let's sing!

Cheers,
Martina ;-)

How to learn languages for free!

Hi, girls!
I was surfing the Net this morning and I run into Alexandra Peron's blog, one of the girls who attended the course last semester. She added a video from YouTube which is really really helpful for us and for our language learning.
I went to YouTube, I found the video and now I'd like to share it with you all. It gives helpful suggestions about how we can learn languages for free. Look at it!

Martina

My personal learning experience

[Photo by Google Images]

Hi, girls!

This week we’re supposed to reflect on our personal learning experience, also called PLE. As Sarah pointed out on Wednesday, each person has his/her personal learning style. That’s because not everybody learn in the same way and like the same things: for example, someone could learn from doing, others from listening to sounds, others from reading. For this reason, it’s important to reflect on our learning languages.

So, the question is: HOW YOU LEARN? I thought about it for a while. I analyzed my personal experience and I chose to divide it into 4 categories (here you can find the final mindmap of my PLE):

• Formal learning. We all did –and still do- this kind of experience, because the school is a kind of home from home for young people. The first time I got in touch with foreign languages was during the last two years at Primary School. From then on, my life as a student was a continuous stream of lessons, courses, homework, texts and final exams. I attended two private courses as well and I finally got two certifications: The First Certificate of English and the B1 Zertifikat Deutsch.
• Tools. When you study you need some tools. As for foreign languages, the typical tools you can use are dictionaries, books, movies and tv programs. Recently we’re discovering a new tool, that is Web 2.0. I had no idea of its potentialities…Step by step, I’m discovering a new world. If you can use it properly, you can have an entire world into your hands.
• Travelling. Travels are very important if you study foreign languages, not only because you can speak the language you study, but also because you’re in touch with the culture of that country. Leaning a language from a textbook is quite different from experiencing it on your skin.
• People. People I met in my life played an important role in my learning experience. Obviously I learned a lot from my teachers, but also from my peers both at school and at university. The constant interaction with them, as well as peer’s reviews and teacher’s feedbacks, helped me a lot in improving my skills, pushing me to do all my best. My working experiences were important too. While I worked as a shop assistant – I sold mobile phones- I met many foreigners, and I spoke English and sometimes Spanish with them. In order to do that, I had to learn some new vocabulary, because I didn’t know anything about mobile phones in English. But the most important working experience for my language learning was when I worked as an hostess in an international medical congress in Venice. The official language was English (of course!), so I had to speak English all the time. It was very hard because I worked in the reception and I always was in touch with people attending the congress.
  

At the moment, we’re still students, so we still have the possibility of improving our language learning. There will be problems when we’ll take our degree, because if you don’t exercise the language, you’ll unlearn it. We should find some tools which could help us in the future. It could be hard to do, because when you work you don’t have so much time to spare, but we should strain ourselves if we don’t want to loose all the things we learned so far. And after all…You can’t do anything without any effort!

Martina

What a wonderful world - Louis Armstrong

I found two moving videos in YouTube, both playing the wonderful song by Louis Armstrong "What a wonderful world". You already know how much I like this song (it's the title of my blog)and I couldn't resist sharing these videos with you all.

What's good and what's bad in the Web

[Photo by Google Images]

Hi, girls!
This week we aren’t supposed to learn new tools, but to reflect on how we judge the huge amount of information we find in the Net. We experienced the Net’s vastness in these two months. In our e-tivities, we were always surprised at the difficulty we found in choosing podcasts, websites, videos and blogs, just because there were too many of them!
Hopefully, we’ll soon begin writing our thesis and the Web will be maybe the main source we’ll use. Now the obvious question is: how can we judge the right source for us? I mean, we should understand what could be useful and what not. Before reading the websites Sarah suggested, I wanted to reflect on what I usually do when I have to find a piece of information in the Web. I thought about my recent experience, when I had to write my final dissertation to take my first degree. I must admit I found many difficulties because it was the first time I did a bibliographical research. I didn’t know where to start. The problem was that the Spanish author I had to write about wasn’t so famous in Italy, so there weren’t many books about him in the libraries. My only solution was the Web. I was quite lucky because there’s the website of his foundation, where I could find many useful links to other sources, always related to his works and life. But the difficulty here was to decide what kind of information I needed. Basically, I searched for documents written by academic writers but what I evaluated at most was the content. I wondered if the content could deal with the topic of my dissertation and that was all.
But reading the websites Sarah suggested, I found out that my evaluating skills were rather inadequate. My main problem is that my skills at computer are basic and I still haven’t found my feet with search engines: I simply open Google, type some keywords and then visit the first two or three sites that appears (I’ve always thought they should be the most relevant!). I knew there was the possibility of doing an advanced research, specifying what kind of information I wanted, but I didn’t know the domain names I was supposed to use. Now I discovered that if I need –for example- a website run by a government agency, I should type .gov. Then I didn’t know that specialized search engines existed: I had a look at Google scholar, a search engine aimed at academics, and then I found Google book, a search engine which only searches for books. I also tried the meta-search engine called Mamma. It’s the “mother of all search engines” and searches “other search engines and give you the most relevant returns from each” (to read the whole article, click here). I tried typing “Francisco Ayala” -the Spanish author about whom I should write my theses- both in Google and in Mamma. I was rather surprised when I saw the results of my search: I had more than 2 millions of returns by Google, while by Mamma I had only 33 returns!
I never thought that there could be so many things to take into consideration to evaluate a Web source. It could be really time demanding but I think that it’s the only solution if we want to get out of the huge amount of information avaiable in the Web!

See you next week!

Have a nice week end!

Martina

Tech problems are always with me!

[Photo by Google Images]

Hi, girls!

I'm terrible sorry but I couldn't post my e-tivity in time because of...Guess what? TECH PROBLEMS! I had to install the modem by myself. At first, the broadband seemed to function yesterday but then I couldn't navigate many websites...The broadband didn't work! Anyway, today everything seems all right...I don't know why, but it's all right! So, now I'll work on our e-tivity and I'll post it in the afternoon.

Sorry for all these troubles. I hope things will better from now on!

Thanks very much for your patience.

Kisses,

Martina