Self-assessment of my Intercultural Competence

Hello everybody!

Unfortunately my English course is over and it’s time again for me to take stock of what I’ve learnt during the past semester and to evaluate my intercultural competence and language learning. I’ve tried to reflect on the experiences I’ve had in the past two months and to understand if and how they have changed my attitudes and beliefs about cultures and improved my language skills.

As regards my experience of the exchange, I must admit that it hasn’t been easy to assess my ICC and language learning; as I started the Padova-Dickinson exchange only one month ago I didn’t have the opportunity to skype many times with my American peer Corina and share many ideas with her. Anyway, I think the Skype exchange was really a nice experience and I definitely learnt something.
I think just using Skype instead of other means of communication has helped creating curiosity and interest. I actually had the opportunity to learn something about American culture through a direct contact with an American girl and this situation encorouged me enormously to interact with a great sense of freedom and to reflect more thoroughly on what I was speaking about. Speaking without seeing each other helped me paying more attention on language accurancy too.
I was particularly interested in listening to Corina talking about American university life and American health care. I compared the situation in America with that in Italy and I spontaneously reflected on my culture from a critical point of view. I realized that university life in America is very different from the Italian one. For example, spending a long time far away from home is normal for American students; they actually learn to be indipendent earlier than Italian students. The first time we skyped we also talked a lot about immigration. That time I particularly found myself asking Corina a lot of questions about the attitude Americans have towards immigrants because I believe we can learn a lot from their experience.

taken from http://www.irc-international.com/

The intercultural experience during the whole semester has been really positive for me. I realized I was very interested in other’s people way of life. I was particularly interested in understanding how Americans see immigrants, both foreigners coming from Europe and those coming from poorer countries. Moreover, even if I didn’t talk about it with Corina, I would be interested in knowing what the attitude towards black people is really like.
Furthermore, I believe I made some progress in changing my perspective when looking at my culture. For example, when we analysed the Italian and American political propaganda for the elections I tried to look at the Italian politics as an American would do and to understand what he/she could think about it.
I also realised that I am able to cope with the reactions people from different cultures may have to the way I express myself and what I say. When Corina didn’t understand what I was saying I tried to explain myself better using simpler words and to provide my point of view.
Through the editing of the two wiki pages and the contribution to the forum I learnt some important facts about the American culture and about the country and people that I did not know before. For example now I know how the electoral system in the US works and what the most important points of the candidates’ platforms are. Thanks to the final project I learnt much about the American health care system; I really didn’t know before that there is a crisis of primary care in America.
During the skype exchange I also realised that I’m able to maintain a conversation with people of other cultures by showing my interest in their culture. I find it important to show them that I try to understand their point of view and to look at my own culture as not necessarily the best one.

As far as my language learning is concerned, I definitely made a great progress. Doing the final wiki project I especially learnt many specific words in the field of health care and consolidated what I had learnt in the first semester; for example, rewriting the information I had found out in a more concise way helped me make improvements in writing with proper punctuation.
I believe I also made some progress in my pronunciation because I tried to speak more fluently and to imitate the stress-timing way of speaking. During the Skype exchange I also tried to change the way I speak Italian in order to make Corina feel at ease; I tried to avoid complicate and local expressions and to use shorter sentences.

I'm aware that I'm just at the beginning of a long process to acquire cultural consciusness but I firmly believe that the experience I've had during this semester has been particularly valuable for achieving this aim. This experience has definitely been very useful for both my knowledge of the American culture and the improvement of the English language.