Last Wednesday at last I had my first Skype exchange with the American peers!:) I couldn’t wait to start this experience because I’m a firm believer that communicating with native speakers is the best way to improve the language and become aware of their culture.
The American student who will work with my group for this year's final project is Corina. This week Elisa and me skyped with her and next week it’s Chiara and Caterina’s turn. Since we are a group of four people we decided to split up and alternate two each week because it would be difficult to speak all together with Corina in a Skype session that lasts only one hour. Anyway, I realized that, even if we were three instead of five, while you are skyping the time flies and you don’t manage to talk about every thing you would be supposed to. I feel that since we unfortunately have this opportunity only every two weeks it won’t be easy to improve spoken fluency and accurancy significantly and working for our final project will be more time-demanding. For this reason I would suggest to meet all together for skyping with Corina so that we can decide together about how to develop and improve our wiki page step by step without too much effort.
Although skyping with many people at the same time might be not so easy, I’ve become aware of how much Skype has facilitated the interaction between us and increased interest in what we are doing for our final project. I noticed that skyping helped creating a feeling of community because we shared spontaneously a lot of information and ideas. I found it amazing to have the possibility to express my personality with a great sense of freedom and involvement.
This week we were supposed to speak about immigration in Italy and in America and to choose the topic for our wiki page.
As regards Immigration, we Italians explained to Corina what idea people in the north of Italy have about immigration and where immigrants in our region come from. She explained to us the same thing about her city and told us the history of her family because her mother is Italian. Exchanging opinions and information with Corina was really exciting and motivating because this time I could learn something new through a direct interaction and an “authentic source” of American culture.
taken from www.alignedstrategy.com
As far as the topic for our final project is concerned, Elisa and me decided together with Corina to focus on American and Italian health care system’s negative aspects and suggested as title something like “What’s Wrong with America and Italy’s Health Care System”. We thought that we could exchange our material and ideas per email but Sarah suggested in her post to save the websites we are using for our wiki page on del.icio.us too. I think this is a good idea and on Monday I’ll encourage my peers to choose a common tag for saving our bookmarks. As far as suggestions are concerned, once we will have our wiki page ready I think it will be easier to communicate by using the comment function of the page instead of using emails. Elisa, Corina and me started developing an outline and we realized that it will be easier to develop it properly once we’ve found out on the net enough information on the topic. Anyway, we started thinking about some points we would like to focus on. We though to point out first of all the negative consequences of the public/private cover and then the inefficiencies of the primary care, the hospitals, the emergency, the administation costs in both countries’ health care.
I’m really interested in learning more about this issue! Let’s start doing some research!
Have a nice week-end!
Selena
