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