Final Reflection

When I started searching for a course back in October, I knew that I wanted to do an Italian course, however seeing as I was not a beginner language learner, I wanted something a bit more advanced. When I came across the e-learning course produced by RAI, I knew it was an authentic course. RAI is an Italian television/media station that has a lot of prestige and it’s website is quite useful for language learning.

When I began working through the 4 hours of course topics that I chose, I started to understand the structure of the course and was interested to listen and write responses to questions. Soon after this however, the format began to seem a bit repetitive and I felt restricted as a learner because I wasn’t able to exercise my language skills of speaking and reading. All I was doing was listening and writing short responses. I did satisfy one of my objectives, which was to refresh my knowledge of Italian gramma structures. In many of the exercises, basic knowledge of gramma was expected which made me really think about all the old gramma rules that I learnt at school. The course also presented me with complex gramma structures that only appear in certain circumstances. This helped refine my already existing knowledge and allowed me to take something from the course.

I don’t know whether the incorporation of audiovisual material was done effectively in the course. At the start of topics, the role-play situation was a cartoon animation clip, which didn’t give facial cues that are needed to fully understand an Italian person. By focusing on skill of listening while playing a cartoon clip, it seemed to me that the cartoon distracted the learner from fully engaging with the excerpt. It was only when I clicked to read the dialogue at the same time as I viewed, that I was able to concentrate on the words and not the pictures.

Nothing in the course helped me to learn through my visual learning style preference. There were no diagrams, or tables. A few pictures existed by they were more of a decoration rather than a teaching aid. The whole format of the course was; question, answer, question, video, answer, question, audio, answer, gramma question, answer, repeat.

When I first looked at the course objectives, they were all written in Italian. I translated them and posted them on my weblog. Some of the wording was slightly strange, but I left the translation as a whole and translated word for word.

I liked the way the course was structured around four topic areas. I found the topic on finding an apartment the most fun, because I will have to do exactly that when I go to Italy next year. After completing this topic I went ahead and practiced my spoken Italian, creating a short podcast, which was an interesting task.

My plan to approach the course with a strategy of timing worked really well. I did two hours, and then broke up the next two hours so that I gave myself a bit of a break and some time to write reflections. I kept evidence of what I was learning throughout the course by copying screen shots of each activity. This allowed me to then easily comment in my weblog about the problems I encountered with accents. I also spoke about the feedback that I received and discussed the confusion of instructions in some exercises. Creating an ANIMOTO video with the photo evidence was also an exciting process. I learnt about Animoto when I did e-learning design and wanted to try and create another video with this subject.