Delicious Bookmarking

Another technological tool to make our life easier. I think delicious is good because it helps to organize what we find in the web and, what is more, it is a good way to SHARE what we think might be interesting for other people too. Indeed, rather than starting exploring the vastness of the web, it is sometimes easier considering what other people have found when making our same reaserch. We can find very interesting websites that we wouldn't probably have found by ourselves.
There's also the possibility of creating a network with the people we know or that have our same interests. The members of my network bookmarked some useful websites:
Sarah saved the bookmark of a web-based journal on English for specific purposes, where you can find a lot of authoritative articles about the English language used in specific fields.
Chiara bookmarked a website about job interviews, which is very useful for me in this moment because I have to prepare a job interview for my English course. Here I can find a lot of tips.
Elisa also suggested me a very good website about English for academic purposes. It is a guide for students in higher education, as it my case. It is well done because there are examples and also practical exercises.

Francesca

RSS and feeds...the discovery of a new world.

I don't know if you already knew RSS and feeds aggegators, but for me it was a sort of 'revelation'! It is a very useful tool I think, because it allows you to keep track of blogs or websites you're interested in. You save a lot of time, and it is extremely efficient, because you get only the updates. I, for example, created a playlist with 3 italian newpaper websites, so that I can receive the news as titles, or, if I prefer to, as titles with a short explanation. I think onlines newspapers are a good way to get informed, but you don't always have the time to go into the websites, looking for the real news, as there's usually a lot of advertisement, dossiers, gossip and so on. Actually, if you're interested in gossip you can subscribe to the "gossip" RSS feed of that website ;-).
I have to say that there are a lot of useful resources to use the web in a more effective way. Unfortunately, I don't know most of them, and I think that in general they are not really exploited. We are all Internet users, but probably not very conscious ones!

Francesca

Language learning target

Unfortunately I couldn't attend our first thursday lesson, but I thought by myself about my language targets for this semester, which, by the way, is also supposed to be my last semester!
I think I need to be more accurate in structuring clauses and in the use of punctuation. So grammar is always there until the end!!! When I hear someone saying that English grammar is easy, you know, I always smile by myself :-) The difficult thing is that I'm always influenced by Italian clause structures...probably because I am surrounded by Italian. I think, then, that the blogosphere could be very usesful to plunge into English.
I often have the impression that my lexicon is quite limited. Or, better said, the words and the expressions that I know, that is, that I can recognize and understand when listening and reading, are at this stage quite a lot. The problem is, that I actually use very few of them in my oral and written productions. Another target is then trying to enrich and vary my use of language.
As I already pointed out in our initial presentations to the course, as a more general target I want to improve my oral skills: I need to be more fluent. For this purpose, our thursday lectures are particularly useful, as we have the opportunity to speak. We all learnt in our first year "Linguistica" exam that spoken language has priority over written language. It's a pitty that our university course didn't take into account this priority. It's up to us now looking for occasions to practice!


Francesca

Welcome!

Hello!
welcome to my blog. I can't say what you will be finding in it, as I really don't know what to expect from this new experience. What is sure is that you are going to find a little bit of me. Sharing is certainly the main purpose of blogging. I hope this sharing to be fruitful, so feel free to leave your comments!

Francesca