First of all I ‘d like to tell you something about my job.

Well, I was a sort of assistant for students with learning disabilities.

All my time there was characterised by mutual help between me and the students; in fact while I was trying to be of assistance to them, they gave me a hand to improve my English.

Overall I enjoyed my job because I had the opportunity to feel useful for somebody. So, even if I  hadn’t learnt anything, I would still be proud of my experience.

Of course, I had contact with a lot of young and friendly people and I was speaking English all the time. In the end, I couldn’t have asked for a better job.

I really think that living abroad is the best way to learn a new language, the important thing is being fairly outgoing and friendly .

Of course a different culture presents some problems, such as food and customs, but it is worth a try.

I remember that my housemates and I cooked for our host family twice. Those were the best dinners of the holiday and it was the first time that they had a healthy meal. But anyway  nobody  will ever die from eating English food for a month .

During the course we worked on three plays about teenagers’ life and the world of work.

We enjoy acting and we think that through it we have improved our spoken English in a natural context.

We got more confident in speaking English and we became more self-confident by acting in front of a  camera. We think that all this can help us to deal with problems linked with a foreign culture.

Each of the three plays gives us a message: the one about work can teach us that working takes responsibility and being careless can create many problems with customers or get you into trouble;

The love story teaches that a real friendship is more important than a infatuation;

The last one is about bullying and it reminds us that adolescence is the first period when teenagers have to take important decisions regarding their behaviour and their future.

All plays are linked to the aims of the project. In fact they are firstly to bring us closer to the world of work, but through this we should get to know more about English culture.

Mirko

I spent three weeks in Wales and I lived in a house with three other Italians. It was my first time abroad and I was worried because I’d never been to Wales before . Our host lady wasn’t very friendly in fact she only said “hi girls” or “bye girls”. We spent the first week visiting castles near the town. We met two Italian girls that had lived there for about two or three months, they showed us what kind of jobs we had to do. I worked with Mirko in the ‘access’ a special detached section of a college where disabled children were given help to do their classwork. I was very happy because I tried to be useful and by following the lessons I tried to help some children. During the first week I wasn’t very friendly because I needed time to become confident but after the first week I met a lot of English people aged from 10 to 15 and they were happy because it was the first time that Italian teenagers had a working experience in their school. Everybody in our group was sent out to work, for example in a restaurant in a office or a shop but I think that my job was one of the most exciting and it wasn’t boring. On the last day when I had to say goodbye I was very sorry because a friendship had sprung up between me and an English teacher.

Jessica