MY PERSONAL LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENTS

Hi guys!

This is the map of my PLE (Personal Language Environments). If you want to see the image bigger, just double click on it or you can go here or here and have a look at it in its original size.

I really liked this e-tivity because I had the chance to reflect on my language learning in detail and on the tools I use to improve my learning. I think that this is very important now because in the last two months we discovered a lot of new tools (blogs, podcasts, YouTube, Social Bookmarking) that can help us in our language learning as they can play an important role in our daily learning and improvement of our level of English. Another reason why I appreciated this e-tivity was because I had never created an online mind map until yesterday. This was the first opportunity I had to create an online mind map and I really enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun too! MindMeister is a free online mind mapping tool where you can create your mind maps, collect them, share them with your friends or simply export them in your PC as I did. MindMeister is very user-friendly, it's handy in its use and, believe me, if I say so, it means that it is very very easy.

While thinking about my personal English learning environments, I was amazed by the great amount of different tools that came to my mind: there is the formal learning at university but there is also your personal timetable of learning, there are print sources and online sources. Moreover, we can learn English doing other kinds of activities as well, for example working, listening to the music, watching a video or a movie in the original language. I mean, the range of tools is quite endless and our task as ESL students is the one of taking advantage of all these different opportunities in order to develope our personal language learning bringing materials from different kinds of sources. I must say that the English Course we are attending with Sarah greatly helps us to achieve this goal. I decided to divide my PLE map into five sections: each section represents one kind of environment for my English learning. The first one is called "Learning at University" and it includes everything concerned with my formal learning of English: the English Course, the courses of Literature, etc. Another section deals with my "Learning at Work" because English is essential also for my job and my job as well gives me the opportunity to keep up with my English and improve it. Another section concerns with my personal "Learning in the leisure time", that is to say how I try to improve my English also while relaxing and enjoying myself: listening to the music, watching a movie or surfing the Net can be both pleasant activities and strategies to learn English. The forth section is the one of relationships "Learning with my friends" because the best way to learn English is the one to talk in English with somebody, for example with a foreign friend that you met when you were abroad. Finally, last but not least, the section dealing with "Travelling" and the use of the English language to communicate with other people abroad.

I'm curious to have a look at your mind maps on PLE to see which are the similarities and differences with mine.

Let me know what you think about it,

Elena