It's Christmas now!

Merry Christmas and happy new year to everybody!!

MY PLE

Hi!
I think that trying to organize a mindmap of our personal Personal Learning Environment is really useful in order to focus on the things we do to improve our knowledge in the field of languages.
I think that each PLE should often modified and keep up to date, since in our life we do a lot of experiences that could be useful to our language learning; at the moment, I prepared my PLE, which you can see in the photo at the top.
I divided language learning into two categories: informal ways and formal ways. Among the first category, I included four subtypes:
1.technology ( surfing the net, writing emails, our course blog),
2.people ( talking with people at work, with foreign friends, with teachers)
3.enterntainment ( listen to music, watching TV and films, reading magazines and newspapers)
4.travelling ( communication and interaction with people in the country I’m visiting).

Among the second category, I included:
· University
· Reading books to prepare exams
· The use of the dictionary, both bilingual and monolingual
· Language courses and examinations
· Translating and writing texts.

I think that informal ways of learning languages are really important because they’re continuous learning and improvement of language; however, I think that we must start from a solid basis of competence, both linguistic and grammatical, that serves us for our formal use of the language: in translations, in writing our thesis, in doing essays etc. In informal language we’re surely more relaxed in speaking or in writing, and informal is useful to let us know about the real use of the language: slangs, abbreviations etc. ( For example, we can see this point in watching films or listening to music, where one often can’t understand the words the singer is saying because his/her is too fast in pronouncing them or they’re abbreviated).
However I think that these two ways, formal and informal ways of learning languages, can often be combined: for example, during language courses one can use tools like Internet or songs in order to improve the attention and the interest of learners; or even our course blog it’s an example: we use an informal tool and informal language in an University course! Really nice!
Bye!