It's time to assess my Intercultural Competence!

(photo source)

Here we are at the end of the second semester! As all my classmates know, this means the end of our last English course as well! It’s, thus, again time to think a bit about what I’ve learnt or not from this experience! So what this post is all about is reflecting on my learning process and assessing my intercultural competence.

Well, at the end of the first semester, when I carried out my Personal Learning Environment (PLE), I had the feeling that during the first semester I hadn’t increased my intercultural competence as much as I had my language competence. Second language proficiency is certainly an important component of culture but not everything. During this second semester, on the other hand, I focused more on my ICC (Intercultural Communicative Competence), and I improved it thanks to two projects which involved the use of very different tools. The first one, which occupied the first part of this second semester, consisted in the development of a wiki page on 2008 U.S. and Italian elections. I read plenty of information on newspapers from different countries as well as on the candidates’official websites, and I watched videos on YouTube dealing with this topic. All this enabled me to learn more about U.S. and Italian politics (the electoral systems and the candidates’ platforms in particular), but also about the main social issues in the two countries nowadays. For example, I learned more about the problem of health care, gender pay gap, and national security in the United States.

Then, the second part of the semester was even more interesting because Sarah gave me the possibility of Skyping with Chiara, my American peer, and taking part in the Padova-Dickinson forum. It was the first time I could have a conversation about American culture directly with an American student. This exchange was, therefore, a great opportunity to deeply explore the typical life of American young students and look at the U.S.A from their viewpoint. I could listen to what common people living there truly believe, need and experience everyday. Actually, besides travelling, an exchange like this is undoubtedly the best way to learn about the lifestyle, customs, habits, and tastes of people belonging to other cultures. Let me give an example or two. Our peers from Dickinson told us lots of interesting and curious things that are part of their college life: living in the campus, often very far from their families, travelling home just a couple of times a year, taking part in fraternities or sororities, and so on. As I said before, the Padova-Dickinson exchange was a unique chance to know the real opinion of young American people on their society, particularly on big social issues such as death penalty, women participation in politics and in the workforce, or illegal immigration.

With Chiara we spoke a lot about the problems women immigrants and women in general face in Italian and American society as far as job opportunities are concerned. This was, in fact, the topic of our final project. There my group mates and I discussed and compared the following points: women's participation in the labor force, i.e. unemployment and employment rate, women distribution in the labor market and wage discrimination, working women's rights and women's presence in the politics of both countries. Finally, we gave a general overview of the role women immigrants play in U.S. and Italian labor market and the problem of prostitution.

Anyway, I think that the most important evidence of my intercultural competence is that I always had a positive attitude when I spoke with Chiara, even when we had different opinions about, for example, the topic to be developed in our final project. I behaved like she was just a friend, no matter whether she was American or Italian. I didn’t perceive such a huge difference, perhaps, because her parents are Italian so she is partly Italian as well! I was always very open, curious and ready to hear how different U.S. culture could be from mine. Honestly, in my life, I always try to be very tolerant and open-minded in all my relationships even with people of my own culture. I think this is essential for a person studying foreign languages and cultures!

Finally, just a couple of things concerning my language learning. I must say that I’m very satisfied because this semester I practiced not only my reading and writing (wiki pages, newspapers, blogs), but also my listening and speaking (mainly thanks to Padova-Dickinson exchange and YouTube videos). In addition, to write the wiki page for my final project I read a lot of American documents, such as those published by the U.S. Department of Labor; this way I learned new vocabulary and paid a lot of attention to sentence construction and word order. I think that one of my most significant improvements is that I write less run-on sentences!

The very last think I’d like to point out is that in my group there were five people, including Chiara, so it was not always so easy to organize our work in a balanced way and meet everybody’s needs, such as finding a topic for the final project that interested everybody, organizing a parallel work, subdividing it, and so on. However, we all developed our collaborative skills and learned that good organization and co-operation are fundamental in order to be a successful team!

Ok! This is the end of my last blog post (at least for my Bloggingenglish course) and the end of an adventure so I just want to thank my professor Sarah for such an innovative, involving and helpful English course and all my peers (including Chiara) for their collaboration and help throughout this last year together :-)

See you!

Elena