PLE

Better later than never!!
I must admit I have left aside my blog for a good deal of time…but now I want to put right! I say sorry to you, group H, for my terrible delay…You are always on time with your work while I have been a bad girl!!!

I read all your posts and, since we have a similar school career and more or less the same age, I think we consider the same things. As Alessia wrote, learning is a continuum, that is, neither you can divided sharply the various experiences or steps of your have done during the years nor you can always clearly distinguished a formal environment from an informal environment (our curiosity often lead us to explore things which are nothing to do with academic topics!!).

Also I agree with Caterina when she wrote that learning a language is a difficult and long process in which experiences such as travels, Erasmus, tandem-learning…play a great role.
Nowadays, Internet offers us an opportunity we hadn’t six or seven years ago, namely, “to do in English” what we “do in Italian”…I mean you can read websites, books, newspapers, watch movies, sketches, adds...look for anything you like in different languages.

As always, when you talk about learning or improving a language, the only real thing to do is to go into a country where the idiom you are studying is spoken: in this way I think that your “PLE” is really exploited in every its aspect and opportunity.

In brief:
- in a formal environment (school, university): lessons, thesis, exams, discussions, exchanges between universities, text books, essays, translation.

- in an informal environment: travels, listening to radio or music, watching movies and TV programmes, audio-books, websites, podcasts.