My Tube!

Hello all!

I know classes have just finished but - as I said in my previous post - my learning path will go on and on, and on...and my blog will keep on helping me in this process!

During our last class my classmates and I talked with Sarah about the benefits of music & videos in learning English. Almost everybody agreed on the fact that listenting to music and watching videos in English turn to be particularly useful to improve our vocabulary, especially when combining these practices with the reading of lyrics, original subtitles or translation into English.

Personally, I've always thought about the fact that music was helpful to improve my pronunciation & vocabulary but I never tought before that rhythm could help me with intonation. Good discovery for me and for my obsession with 'paduan' accent! :)

As you can read in some of my last posts (here and here), I love music, videos and I join these passions using YouTube. It's an amazing tool!
In particular, I like the fact that in YouTube you can find loads of cartoon videos, such as The Simpson or Family Guy. I find this kind of videos extremely useful. They represent a good way to approach - in a foreign language - difficult communicative techniques, such as irony, cynicism, mockery or satire, using simple and immediate tools, that's to say images/cartoons.

Well, I can't post there every single video I found interesting but I want to give you an info to key in YouTube: "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy". It is a channel that is broadcast directly on YouTube by BurgerKing®; the cartoons that are broadcast are drawn by Seth MacFarlane (the same cartonist of Family Guy). Hope that nobody get offended by the "adult-oriented" content ;)
BTW, they are awesome!

Have fun!

Bye
Giorgia

Mapping my mind out!

Hello all!

You know that my classmates and I have been through a long process of building up our own learning environment (see here and here). What I want to do in this post is to recap what I've done and learned so far.

My big little steps:

• I took Sarah's language classes to be guided in the building up of my PLE (from both a linguistic and computering viewpoint);
• I started running my own blog;
• I made a first draft of my possible [desired ;)] language path. I wrote on a piece of paper the aspects of my English that I'd have wanted to improve (writing & spoken interaction);
• I worked on mutual feedback with my classmates;
• I tried to take advantage of any profitable situations, using English whenever it was possible (e.g. DVDs, books, TV programs);
• I learned to use many interesting tools, such as GoogleDocs or Google Scholar (see Utilities on my blog's sidebar); they helped me to limit, perfect and focus my exploration of the Net in search of useful tips to improve my English.

As you can see the project involved a lot of aspects that had to be handled simultaneously. It was difficult to learn, search, study & improve at the same time but in the end the hard work is worth it. What's more, this kind of work - building up my PLE - will finish by neither the end of the English course nor the end of my academic career: your PLE is your own learning path, it's yours so it can last forever and be changed whenever you want!

Here it is the mindmap of my personal learning environment: MY PLE.

Bye
Giorgia
(photo source)

Family Guy

Hello all!

A few days ago I was surfing the net searching for something fun, and I thought...Giorgia, why don't you look for something entertaining and useful at the same time, that's to say, something amusing and linked to English?!?

So, I decided to put here a video from YouTube. The video is part of an episode from 'Family Guy', an American animated TV sitcom. In Italy the sitcom was broadcast on Italia1 changing the title into 'I Griffin'.

I love this show and I bought many DVDs with its episodes. After all, I bought them in English so they are useful for my personal learning environment! LOL :)

The show is known to have an adult content but I consider my readers grown up enough to handle it ;) and I know that you will enjoy it! I dare you to find somebody who doesn't like Family Guy at all!

Episode: Chicken Fight



N.B. No chickens were harmed during the making of this video ;)

See ya!
Giorgia

Looking through my magnifying glass...

Hello all,

last week we talked about source evaluation and we came up with a lot of criteria through which analyse the reliability of a piece of writing.

A few days ago I found an interesting article on PLEs (personal learning environment) and I want to evaluate it through some of the criteria Sarah gave us in handout1.

Here it is what I've found:

1.Who's the researcher? Graham Attwell, director of the Wales based research organisation, Pontydysgu. The paper was also published in a website's page of the University of La Rioja (Spain).
2.What's the goal of the research? The paper explores the ideas behind PLEs and why PLEs might be useful and crucial to learning in the future. The paper also considers the technologies (i.e. blogs and wikis) that can be used in PLEs and the aggregation of different devices. At the end, the paper provides examples of practices on how PLEs can come in useful in the future.
3.Where and when was the research carried out? E-Laearning Paper published in 2007, edited by P.A.U. Education S.L., Barcelona - Spain.
4.What kind of study/data collected? The data are qualitative and the paper is provided with examples/case studies.
5.Was it large or small scale? I would say quite large, since the subjects taken into account are various: PLEs, technology, blogs/wikis, net generation. Moreover, the subject is considered to be in continuous evolution.
6.Was it short or long term? I think short term, in the sense that the author considers PLEs in the present moment in which he's writing, but he specifies that the subject is undoubtedly going to develop in the future.
7.What conclusions were drawn? The conclusions are easy to understand; they are based on the evidence presented in the paper.

Ok...Hope you find it interesting!

Bye
Giorgia
(photo source)

Happy Easter!

Hello all,

I just want to say...

Buona Pasqua (Italian) :)
Vrolijk Pasen (Dutch)
Joyeuses Pâques (French)
Frohe Ostern (German)
Καλὸ Πάσχα (kalò Pàskha)(Greek)
E ʻôlelo mâlie (Hawaiian)
Boa Páscoa (Portuguese)
¡Felices Pascuas! (Spanish)
IPhasika elijabulayo (Zulu)
復活節快樂 (fùhuójié kuàilè)(Chinese Mandarin)
ਈਸਟਰ ਖੁਸ਼ਿਯਾੰਵਾਲਾ ਹੋਵੇ (īsṭar khuśyāṅvālā hove)(Punjab)
Христос воскресе (Xristos voskrese)(Russian)
Geseënde Paasfees (Afrikaans)
عيد فصح سعيد (Arabic standard)
शुभ ईस्टर (śubh īsṭar)(Hindi)
イースターおめでとう (īsutā omedetō)(Japanese)
สุขสันต์วันอีสเตอร์ (Suk-sənt-wən īs-toer)(Thai)
Heri kwa sikukuu ya Pasaka (Swahili)
חג פסחא שמח (chag pascha same'ach)(Hebrew)

Just a few of all the wonderful languages all over the world!

OMG!
I ate too much...My mom and my aunts do not understand the words NO, THANKS - NO, I'M FINE - THAT'S ENOUGH! - I'M BLOWING UP!

BTW,I just want to post a link to an interesting .pdf on 'personal learning environment'. I found it using Google Scholar and I'm going to analyse it using what we've learned on reliability. I'm going to bookmark it too.

Have a nice day!

Bye
Giorgia
(photo source)

FeedBACK to get FORWARD

In parallel with the running of our blogs, me and my classmates are working a lot on mutual feedback, especially about grammar issues.
I think that getting feedback is an extremely useful way to get aware of our frequent mistakes; it is difficult for me to always recognize my errors, especially if I'm the only reader of my pieces of writing. :)
I sometimes notice my mistakes but you know...the more you go on reading and re-reading the same passage, the less you'll realize the errors inside.
BTW, if you've already read my post on 'personal learning environment', aka PLE, you know that in the last couple of weeks I've removed a few things from my vocabulary: present perfect (really hard, as you can see above!!!) and 'also'.

During the last lesson we continued our work on grammar improvement; we talked about 'building sentences', especially using subordinators and conjuncts. I learned that:
- subordinators (e.g. although, since, when) are never preceded by a comma;
- conjuncts (e.g. in addition, to sum up, therefore) are always independent words or expressions followed by a comma. They can be preceded only by a full stop or a semi-colon.
It is important to remember that subordinators and conjuncts are very formal expressions that tend to make the syntax heavy. So, if you manage to express yourself clearly and logically without those expressions, don't use them!

Then we talked about relative clauses (defining and non-defining), which are used to give additional information about something just mentioned without starting another sentence.
If you want some good tips about the above mentioned grammar issues, take a look to Grammar Girl, an helpful website about linguistic topics.

Ok guys...Hope this information will help you!
And I hope to get more and more aware of my mistakes and get rid of them!

Bye
Giorgia

Language Learning

I just want to say briefly for those who may not understand who I'm referring to when I write 'we' or 'us' (hoping that someone else - apart from my classmates - will read my blog! :) ) that this blog is part of an academic course of English language.
That said, as I told you on the previous post, this blog can be an extremely useful tool to improve English. Blogging and - primarly - reading others' blogs and get feedback or comments on yours are parts of what we called during class 'personal learning environment'.
As a matter of fact, reading others' words or get your pieces of writing corrected make you notice which are your weak points/frequent mistakes and how to get rid of them.
Thus these are the 'things' that I wanna get rid of (I'll get them back as soon as I learn how to use them properly!!!):

. present perfect
. 'also'

First of all, I have to remove the present perfect because the more I think about its use the more I mistake. I think that sometimes it's really difficult for an Italian native speaker to understand the subtle difference between present perfect and past simple, especially when the fact that you are describing happened not long ago.
Secondly, I have to get rid of the adverb 'also' because wherever I put it, it's always the wrong place :). I think that this mistake depends on the fact that I use 'also' as the italian equivalent 'anche', but syntactically they are very different.
I hope I'm not the only one dealing with these problems :(
Well...Let me know what do you think about this kind of issues, so we can discuss them together and help each other out!

Apart from these last (and new) notes, last week we fulfilled a personal ‘To Do List’ on the next language goals we would like to achieve. As far as I’m concerned, I never thought of designing my own language path before. However, to sit down, think and write my personal needs & projects made me feel more realistic on what I’ve learnt so far and what I still need to learn. As a matter of fact, I realized that I want to be more confident when I have both to communicate and interact in English. I want to organize my speeches and my pieces of writing better, more coherently. I want to enrich my vocabulary both formal and informal. And I want to get rid of my usual mistakes (see above). That said, I committed myself to spent at least 30/60 minutes a day practising my English in any possible way: reading books, newspapers or magazines, watching movies without subtitles, surfing the net, reading my classmates’ blogs and trying to interact during classes as much as possible.

Easier to say than do! :)

However, to point out this ‘To Do List’ was a good thing indeed!

Let’s start and see what happens as we go along!
Okay, that's all for now...

Bye
Giorgia