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.

My First Skype Exchange

Hello everybody!

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

About Immigration

Hi everybody!

This week I’ve been supposed to have my say about immigration in Italy and to start thinking about what cultural aspect of Italy and the USA I would like to explore further in my group’s future wiki page.

While until a few decades ago Italy was identified with an emigration country, today it is having to deal with an increasing number of foreign people from various parts of the world. Italy has been therefore faced with a challenging change in her role in political, social, economic and cultural terms.
When I think about immigration in Italy I automatically think about problems it has caused in our country; I often associate the term immigration with episodes of racism and violence. Right now one of the problems in Italy is illegal immigration and criminality. A few foreigners are actually committing crimes and even if they are a small group they are creating a negative image of the rest of the legal foreigners in the country. This situation has inevitably increased xenophobia amongst both Italians and foreigners. I believe that Italy needs stricter laws for reducing the number of illegal immigrants and for punishing crimes. This way foreigners might gain more respect as a whole from the native Italian society.

While I was reflecting on immigration in Italy I realized that this might be an interesting topic for my group’s final project. Immigration is actually one of the Italian cultural aspect which is discussed more frequently within my family and my circle of friends. Furthermore, as immigration is still a relatively new phenomenon for Italy and on the contrary a well-established phenomenon for America a comparison between the two countries’ immigration policies might be extremely interesting for understanding their strong points as well their weak points, their values as well as their defects.

See you in class!

Have a nice Sunday!

Selena

What's going on with the elections?

Hello everyone!

What’s going on with the elections this week?

I’ve kept reading articles about the elections in the US and in Italy in TimesOnline, FAZ and ElMundo.

I’ve observed that news about American elections are still about the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. There have been incrasingly bitter exchanges between the rival campaings; Obama and Clinton seem to have the conviction that personal attacks raise doubts about the opponent’s electability. On the contrary, now there is the feeling that both sides should keep their mouth shut if they don’t want to lose their prospects of winning the White House in November; the attacks they are making on each other are full of anger and hatred and convey the idea that both candidates are using these strategies because of their harmful positions in the race. Moreover, in all three newspapers I noticed an attack on Hilary Clinton’s credibility; a video shows that what she said about her arrive in Bosnia a few years ago is not true and so provides the evidence of her lies (even if she told later that she had misspoken). I believe Americans are suffering a crisis of confindence in the leadership of both candidates. As a result McCain seems to gain strength and become the favourite.

taken from msnbc

As regards the issues discussed in these weeks, the war still seems to be the leading concern for voters. Nonetheless, as last week there was the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq it was expected that there would be more headlines in newspapers about this issue; on the contrary, it appears that the war was out of the limelight and replaced by the economy. The right-wing candidate above all concentrates their speeches on the war; he is very determined to convince Americans to continue military action.
In addition to the basic points of candidates’ platforms, this week race has been for the first time an explicit issue in candidates’ speeches. Obama’s pastor Rev JeremiahWright had stated that America couldn’t change about racial prejudice and the dissemination of this idea was actually threating Obama’s strategy for dealing with his racial identity, the most important pillar of his campaign. During his last speech Obama strongly tried to convey the message that even if he has a black face, he will be capable of representing the nation in all its diversity and that he might be the only one capable to heal the racial divisions. In fact, it seems that it has long been clear that Obama can be the first black president only if he is not seen as a black candidate; there is actually a general idea that he can’t win the elections if race is a predominant issue.

As far as Italian elections are concerned, in addition to TimesOnline, FAZ and ElMundo I took a look at the online Italian newspaper IlSole24Ore, which seems to be one of the most impartial newspaper in Italy. This week’s headlines are above all about the crisis of Alitalia, the crisis of Buffalo mozzarella because of the continuing rubbish crisis in Naples linked to the local mafia, about the retirement plan and the videos made by PDL and PD. While two weeks ago there was no trace of news about Italian elections in all three foreign newspapers, this week they all have pointed out Italy’ problems about economy, politics and criminality; I feel that foreign countries don’t have high regard of Italy.

taken from interfree

In the latest news of all newspapers there is a general feeling that this is a strange electoral campaign; platforms’ basic points and the two main parties’ goals are actually quite similar (even if in the last few weeks there was a marked difference about the solution of Alitalia’s case). Moreover, this week PD’s video has attracted a lot of criticism. Both Veltroni’s video and Berlusconi’s video are actually quite ridiculous because none of them mirror reality; these two videos misrepresent the opinions Italians and above all joung people have about politics. I think that instead of gaining votes these two videos have actually ruined politicians’credibility.
Taking all these points into consideration, I feel that on 13th and 14th April there might be a lot of abstensions.

Bye bye,
Selena

The news about the elections from UK, Germany and Spain

Hello everybody!

As the development of Intercultural Competence involves contact with other world views this week we’ve been supposed to compare the news regarding the elections in Italy and in the United States in sources from three different countries. Through this task we had the opportunity once again to experience a shift of perspective and appreciate similarities and differences among different cultures and languages.

This time I’ve decided not to analyse sources from Italy and the United States, but to concentrate on what other countries think and write about the two political elections. I chose to follow the online news of newspapers from three European countries: the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain. I decided to focus on newspapers with a slight centre-right inclination and I came up with the English newspaper The Times, the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Spanish newspaper El Mundo. They all are daily national newspapers with wide circulation in their countries and abroad.

taken from students.usm.maine.edu

Before I started looking for news I was really curious to find out what United Kingdom, Germany and Spain thought about the general elections in Italy. When I began taking a look at the three online newspapers I was immediately disappointed; there is no trace of Italian elections! The latest news about Italian politics were about the dissolution of parliament by the president Giorgio Napolitano and the date for the general elections. Italy seems to be really forgotten by the close European countries which prefer to concentrate on other international issues and on more powerful countries.

On the contrary, all three newspapers have a special part in their websites for US political elections.
From the homepage of The Times’ online version TimesOnline you can access the News and then choose the section World News. From this point you can further narrow down your research by selecting the news regarding the world’s most critical areas. So you will click on the US and Americas News and find a special link to a blog about US elections and the latest news in the centre of the page about White House 2008.
Once you open the homepage of FAZ.NET, the online version of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, you will find under Politics a special section called Wahl in America. Here you can find a table with all the primaries’s results so far and the latest news.
From the homepage of the online newspaper elmundo.es you can access the news about US elections through the section International. Here you can find material on the right side of the page by clicking on a linkable section called La Carrera Hacia La Casa Blanca. In this special website you can read the main news about the super tuesday, comment on the blog’s posts, watch videos, see pictures and the primaries’ calendar.

All of them offer a lot of information about US elections, but I noticed some differences in the amount and visibility of coverage. While English and German material is daily updated, Spanish reportage only focuses on the fundamental news. Furthermore, the Spanish online newspaper has the link to US elections on a little image on the right part of the page. It has been actually more difficult to find Information about US elections on the Spanish website than on the English and German websites. German and English journalists might give more space to US elections than Spanish ones do because Germany and the United Kingdom have stronger links with the United States.

As regards the words and the images used in the latest reportage, I noticed similarities in all three online newspapers. In the last few days’ articles the most frequent words are racism in TimesOnline, racismo negro (black racism) in elmundo.es and schlamm (dirt), hautfarbe (skin color) in FAZ.NET. All three newspapers convey the idea of an American racial politics. They all focus on the way the nominating battle between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama is going ahead. As both democratic candidates have same ideas and goals in their programs their battle focuses on their different personal roles: she is a woman, he is a man; she is white, he is black. This way democrats are increasingly dividing along ethnic lines and both campaigns are pointing fingers at each other over who is to blame for bringing a virtual race war into the elections.

Have a nice week-end!

Selena

Political Elections 2008

Hi everybody!

The second semester has begun and I’m ready to start reflecting on my personal learning process and keep track of my progress again. In this second part of the course the aim is to develop our own intercultural competence in particular. Let’s start!

As the political elections both in the United States and in Italy are just around the corner this week we’ve been supposed to analyse and compare American and Italian campaigns. I particularly focused on the main candidates on the right: John McCain and Silvio Berlusconi. I took a close look at their personal official websites by carefully watching and listening to some of their speeches.

What I noticed at first sight is that both candidates have great appeal on their audience. In order to make their messages stick in people’s mind both ot them use clear and simple words that everybody can easily understand and remember. In their speeches their ideas are ordered into a logical sequence and supported by a lot of numeric data. Both candidates speak in a strong and clear voice which seems to be quite convincing. Moreover, I noticed that they often use the word responsibility; this way they might want to enhance their role and gain credibility.

I tried to identify key words and expressions that the candidates use in their campaigns and I noticed that they have some values in common.

The role of the family seems to be a very important value.

The word family is one of the most frequently used expressions in Berlusconi’s speeches. To help the family is actually one of his goals. He wants to keep taxes low, give each family a house, provide better social services and give a future to young people. In this context the word children is frequently used in particular. Not only does he mention the family as one explicit point of his campaign, but he also cites his family in the examples he uses to support his statements.

As regards McCain, family is neither one of the most frequent expressions he uses nor one of the issues he focuses on in his campaign explicitly. Nevertheless, there are some signals that prove family is one of McCain’s most important values. During his speeches he often appears together with his wife and always thanks his wife and his children for their support. Furthermore, some of his goals such as improving education and medical care are closely linked to family’s welfare.

taken from New York Times

Even if it is not a specific point of their political schedule, religion seems to be another fundamental value in both right-wing candidates’ campaigns.

Berlusconi uses the expression Christian tradition’s values in his speeches and makes use of symbols and meaningful expressions of such tradition to show his faith. When he was interviewed by Emilio Fede, a famous Italian journalist and director of a popular newscast, he was in his house and I immediately noticed that on the walls behind him there were two pictures that represented religious characters. Moreover, the motto of his campaign Italy, stand up! may have religious connotation because the same words are used in the Bible. What is more, Berlusconi refers to his goals by using the term missions which is a typical religious expression.

McCain shows his faith in God as well. In his speeches he uses expressions such as God bless you and God-given rights.

Not only have Berlusconi and McCain these two values in common, but they also have similar goals in their projects. In addition to those I alrealdy mentioned, both candidates focus on important issues concerning employment, business, alternative sources of energy and security.

Nevertheless, Berlusconi and McCain differ from each other about the main idea of their campaign.

The most frequent word in Berlusconi’s campaign is the word freedom. As far as Berlusconi is concerned, freedom is the most important right everybody should have and the key solution for Italy’s problems. The Italian right-wing candidate believes in all kinds of freedom: freedom of thinking, opinion, expression, worship, association, business and market. The name of his party and most of his slogans actually include the word freedom.

taken from Panorama

The most important goal in McCain’s campaign is the defence. The American right-wing candidate focuses on the fight against terrorism. Instead of promoting a common value as Berlusconi does, he points out his own abilities and his own values. Since he has military experience he wants to convince Americans that he is the most appropriate candidate for combatting Islamic extremism. McCain uses words such as courage, experience, strength and leadership.

Why differences exist?

The Italian candidate might want to focus audience attention on values that are shared by the whole society instead of enhancing his own reputation because Italian people have not much confidence in Italian politicians anymore. As in Italy left-wing candidates and right-wing candidates have sometimes completely different points of view they might want to give more prominence to what should be done. On the contrary, American candidates’ goals might be more similar and the issue is to understand who is the best prepared to lead and defend the nation.

See you in class!

Selena

Merry Christmas to All!

taken from http://www.fantom-xp.com/