... and now let's talk about YOGA...

Oh, no... it is not my last hobby; YOGA stands for "Your Objectives, Guidelines and Assessment" form. This week we didn't do our weekly Skype exchange with our American friends, and so Sarah proposed us to do a different work. We were supposed to reflect and examine the developement of our intercultural communicateive competence (ICC or Intercultural Competence, for short). We were supposed to fill a test and use it as a kind of self-evaluation guide. As the explanation of the test says, this document should help us to critically examine our intercultural objectives, serve as guidelines while undergoing an intercultural experience, and provide an assessment tool at variour stages of intercultural development.

The test is divided in 4 sections called: awareness, attitudes, skills and knowledge, and each of them is divided in 4 levels too, educational travel, sojourner, professional and intercultural/ multicultural specialist. I decided to complete the first and the third part, because these are the two that applied directly to my experience. The competences as "educational traveler" are linked with the experience that I had 5 years ago when I went to Edimburgh. I lived there for one month in a campus and I attended a summer school class with other international students.

It was my first time abroad and it was a great opportunity to develop my intercultural competences. Then, in filling the third section, I took into consideartion the experience that I had in January when I worked as interpreter during the Gold Exhibition in Vicenza. Then to fill out the test, I considered my experiences as a foreign languages' student and as a professional as well. I thought of my language competence in general but with an eye on English culture, which is the one I experienced directly.

I think that YOGA Form, first of all, is a good opportunity to sit down and reflect on my progress in intercultural competence. Most of the time we undervalue the importance of reflection on our developments in languages. We are used to study and practice them, without taking into account if what we are doing is useful or not for our everyday life and job's experience. In fact, while ackonowledging that contact and experience with people of other languages and cultures in a positive setting provide excellent opportunities to provoke ICC development, it is also clesr that once the process has begun, its develpoment is an on-going- often a lifelong- process. So, answering the questions, I found out some interesting things about my awaress and attitudes towards languages and cultures differences.

As far as my "educational traveler" experience I demonstrate awareness of differences across languages and cultural, how a specific context alters my interaction with others and I am viewed by members of the host culture. I demonstrate a willingness to interact with members of a host culture, try to communicate in the host language and to behave in "appropiate" ways and also try to deal with the emotions and frustrations caused by my partecipation in a host culture. About skills, I demonstrate flexibility in interactions with people from the host culture and I develop strategies for learning the host language.

Filling out the test, however, I notices that I had the most improvement in the "professional" field. I demonstrate willingness to grapple with multiple ways of perceiving, of expressing myself, and behaving; to engage with others and to try to understand differences in their behaviour and attitude. As an interpreter I tested my languages skills too, and I realized that i can use several cultural frameworks to improve my professional interactions,nad I can communicate effectively with people from various cultures in a range of social domains.

But, in both sections, I even noticed that I have a low competence in the knowledge of the essential norms and taboos of the host culture in general. In my opinion the reason is because during these years at university I more concentrated on studying grammars and theori concept about languages, without paying much attention to the real content of "culture. Having a full knowledge of what "culture" really means, must be essential if we want become great af efficent Mediatori Culurali.

Isn't it???

Xchange, 3rd week

Hi guy..
I hope you have enjoyed this Easter break and that you have time to restore and recollect you energies :- )
In my last post I wrote that I was very happy because of the start of spring; and, of course, in the following day the weather was a disaster; wind, cold, rain and also snow... It seemed as we were in winter...
I didn't do anything interesting in this break, exept eat chocolate, cakes and sleep a lot, but I was sad everydays because of the weather that damaged my Easter's plan..

Anyway, last week the Skype exchange didn't as useful as I expected. I think that the reason was because I didn't have the opportunity to speak with my previous American classmate, Artem. At the very last second Sarah changed the pairing because we Italian students were less than American ones, and so I spoke with a new girl: Michelle. She's very nice, but we spend most of the time to speak about ourselves, to introduce each others and we didn't focus enough about our weekly topic: terrorism and "anni di piombo".

Anyway, about this topic she told me that after September 11th, the situation in USA is completely different. People have become aware of the existence of a king of terrorism that they didn't know before. I asked her something more in details about that day, but she answered me that she hasn't now a vivid memory of what happened because she was too young. But when I asked her about the nowadays situation in USA, her answer caught my attention so much, because she said that now America people are not so much scared and worried about future attacks. They seem to be quite prepared; even better, they are conscious of the possibility that something else in the future could happen, but, on the other hand, they are still living as usual, because, in their opinion, this is the best way to face up too this problem and avoid panic in every-day life. I was very surprise by this consideration.

Fortunately she didn't ask me anything about "anni di piombo" or terrorism in Italy, because I wasn't so much prepared on this topic. I clearly explained her that this topic is not so much analyse during High School education because it's considered too recent by the Educational Minister, and so teachers decided to focused more on the First and the Second World War that the last years of the XX century.
Then our conversation finished without any kind of useful conclusions.
I hope that next time the topic will be more interesting...

See you on Wednesday the 1st...

Happy Easter to you all

Cheers

Xchange, 2nd week

Hello peers!
How are you? I hope you're all fine. Sorry for the late of thi post but this weekend my computer at home decided not to collaborate with me and with my scholar activitives, so I had to postpone the updating of imy blog until this morning.

Anyway.. Have you seen that, at least, SPRING is coming (very slowly,actually), but it's doesn't matter. This morning I'm very happy because walking from the railway station to the university, I saw that trees are already in blossom and the rays of light appared beyond the clouds. It was a wonderful moment. Despite the fact that spring is not my favorite season ( it's summer the best one for me), I think that spring it's a moment of "revival" and "refreshment" from the sadness of winter. It's a source of energy, that will help me for the last months of classes here, at university.

Anyway, about our Skype Exchange, unfortunately I have very few to say. Last Wendnesday, in the Lab, we didn't speak with our American collegues because they had Sping break and so it's a long time since of I hadn't news from my "little" Artem (my American peer). I wrote him a brief message but I haven't had any answer back, yet; who knows, how did he sent these spring holiday?? (maybe I will ask him the next Wendnesday!!!).

Despite this failure of contact with our American friends, last Monday in class we had the pleasure to know Chiara Olivi. She is one of the girls who makes the exchange with our in USA, and last week she came in Italy to meet her parents, that live near Padua. It's was really a nice experience: first of all because Chaira is a very pretty and sweet girl, and secondly because we had the possibility to pose her a lot of questions and discuss about everyting (hobbies, activities, Americal school system, "campus" and also she tolm us her impressions about Italy and our univerisity). I hope that she will take with her in USA a good impression of our group!!!!

About our weekly task, it was quite easy: we were supposed to discuss in our group and to come up with one question to pose to the Americans. After a lot of difficulties to come in contact with my Italian peers, and different opinions about the final question to create, we decided to ask them something more about the Americans' view of Italian lifestyle and in particular how much their view is influenced by mass-media. All our questions were equally interesting but my peers were right. As Martina noticed in hers blog, the question about the influence of mass-media could be a good starting point for a lively general discussion.

Ok guys, now it's time to attend the lesson with Sarah; I'm curious to discover which will be the topic of today!!!

See you soon!
Bye!

Xchange, 1st week

Hi guy,

This second semester is started and another exchange is started too. I wrote in some posts before that the first experience my class had with the Padova-Albany exchange totally failed, and so I was very exiting to start this second semester with its big news.

So last Wednesday, during our usua lesson in the lab, Zara and I had our first Skype exchange with Artem, a really sweety American boy from the University of Dickinson. I think that we all three enjoyed very much, we created a wonderful group of work and found this activity very interesting. What is more, we discovered that in our future discussion we will speak not only in Italian and English, but a little bit in Russian and Romanian too, it's great.

At the beginning Zara and I were very shy and scared too and we hadn't no idea about how start the conversation, but after few minuts we became more confident and we started to talked a lot (in fact at the end of the call I apologised with Artem for my talkativeness :-) ). It was great to discover how interesting and usefull could be this kind of experience. First of all we have the opportunity to speak with a real native English speaker, to listen his pronuntiation and to check our own mistakes. Secondly, by using Skype (it was the first time for me), I understood how easy and simple can be come in contact with people very far away from here.

About the topics of our conversation, we briefly introduced ourselves and than we started with the topic Sarah proposed us for this firts week: American-Italian educational systems, American-Italian lifestyle. It was very interesing speak about them also because Artem said us that he is not an American native boy; he comes from Ucraina, but lives there for three years, and so we had the opportunity to see these various aspects under another point of view: that of a foreing student who lives in American and can easily combine them together.
Zara asked Artem about the costs sustained by Dickinson student to follow the courses. 45,000 dollars per year, but he adds that in the America foreign students normally have financial aids (similar to our "borsa di studio") that allow them to pay the college. After some other little explanations about Artem's preferences, the content of the discussion changed because Zara started to talk about the present political situation in US. I'm not very interested in this topic so I left Zara went on with this topic and I stayed quite for some minutes. Fortunately we decided to discuss about elections next time, and I hope that within one week Zara can forget about it :-)

After that we talked about Italian lifestyle as well. We discovered that Artem is a very soccer addicted (he loves the team of Milan so much ) and so we said him that he' s going to have a lot of soccer-addicted friends next year when he'll live in Italy. He is a very funny boy, educated and very interested in this exchange as well. We tried to speaks Italian too; he had some difficulties but Zara and I were very good Italian teacher for him.

To sum up I can say I had a very positive impression about my American peer and about this starting too. I'm very enthusiastic of it and I'm waiting for the next second "round"

Alessandra