My Personal Language Environment is what I need and use to improve my language learning. I think everyone has her/his own PLE, but there are certainly some similarities in our PLEs.
My PLE is a collection of web-based tools, but also other not web-based tools, informal and formal, that I use to collect, check and gather information.
I think a personal method of language learning is very important because the most of our time, during which we learn a foreign language, is not in class but on our own. It's very useful the works and activities we do when we are alone with only our tools!!! A language learning in class with our teacher is vain if then we don't support it with an individual study.
As the learning can take place in different contexts and situations, during this blog-based course I've learnt there are so many tools to improve my language learning! I think the most useful are websites and blogs about translation and exercises: you can do them whenever you want and they are always updated. On them you can have fun and, at the same time, learn interesting things!!!
A useful way to improve our PLE is surely the Erasmus experience. During it we can get in touch with native speakers, know their traditions and ways of life, and moreover hear their pronunciation and see how they behave in particular situations. At the end we'll feel more sure of our capacity to use the foreign language we are studying. Anyway, we have to continue to improve our language learning with the different kinds of exercises which the web, the tv and our books offer us!!!
So the work is not finished! There are always new things to learn!!!
I hope you can see My PLE that I scanned with my printer! I couldn't do my PLE with FreeMind at all!!! I couldn't download it: probably I'm too awkward to use web technologies!!!
Bye bye,
Letizia
