From the start of my Italian career I never thought that I would be at the point I am now with the Italian language. Italian 203 was a great learning experience and has taught me a great deal about the Italian language and the culture. This leads us to the first category that I talked about in my portfolio which were the communications I, II, and III. For these three items I chose to talk about two different activities that we did in class as well as a project interview that we did. One activity was “interpretive” which was an activity where we got into partners then had to describe a painting that the other partner had to draw out what he/she heard. The next activity I explained was “interpretive” which was the interview project we did. This was a good project for this category because we had to engage with the speaker and the listener. We had to ask questions to a native Italian and record the responses and make a presentation out of it. This was a great learning experience for me because it was my first real time getting to interact with someone from Italy (besides my professors). For the “presentational” item I talked about the activity where situations were displayed on the screen and you and a partner had to pick one and create a skit that matches the situation. This activity was perfect for the “presentation” category because you had to present in front of the class. These three communication items were all similar because it involved communication between different people. The next category is “comparison”. For this category I talked about my slides for interview project. I chose this for comparisons because I compared and contrasted the pros and cons for starting a business in Germany rather than Italy. This fits the category perfectly because I’m comparing two different subjects in Italian. I learned a lot from this project because there was many things I had to do. I had to listen and interact with native Italians and then I had to learn about two different countries and partially their culture. Leading us to the next category which is cultures. For this activity I decided to talk about an article that we read called “Slow Food”. This was a very interesting article and I did learn a lot about the slow food movement in Italy. The activity we did with it were some reading comprehension questions which really made me look into the article and know what was going on. Partially relating to cultures was the category connections. This category was goo because I had to think of an activity where I drew connections from Italian to something else. For this category I talked about the class we had in the Nasher. I learned a lot during this class because we heard about the history of the Nasher then we examined some artworks. I drew connections from the Italian culture in which I learned to the different Italian artworks. The next category was communities. Throughout the years we were apart of the Italian community at Duke. For me, I had some of the same people in my class for three semesters. For this category I talked about Oscar Night, which was a gathering of students in Italian 203 to watch people’s movies. This was a good time because I got to see everyone else’s work as well as my classmates. Lastly, the final two categories were the grammar and vocabulary reflections. When I was reflecting on the vocabulary and grammar throughout the year, I realized this is where I learned the bulk of my Italian knowledge. Throughout the year we did countless activities that helped us get better at developing sentences with correct grammar and an extensive vocabulary. Overall, I learned a lot throughout this year and every category that helped me improve my Italian is in this portfolio.
|