Hello everyone, this is Alessia Fonte from Group 6 教育制度 and this is my personal overview of my experience with the Virtual Exchange 2021 project.

First of all, I think is fair to say that this project helped all students who participated in having a glimpse of the world of student exchanging despite the current state of the covid situation. Personally I wasn’t planning to go study abroad this year anyway but I’m glad I took part in the project because I think it represents a good transitioning experience before really packing our bags and participate in an exchange programme.

In these two months we had to collaborate closely and help each other in order to complete each week at the best of our capabilities and to encourage interest and debate in the speaking lessons; given the different language levels between students this was extremely important to all learn from each other and not only from people whose skills were higher. Between all the activities the speaking lessons were the most challenging, since in the past I only ever participated in those of my own year’s course, suddenly having to take active part in – like in my case – an higher level one with students from LEIG was frightening at first. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to offer good prompts, correct explanations or simply expressing my thoughts but I was wrong: I think that this challenge helped me even more and every student in my lesson was nice and helping when I stammered between words (I even learned a lot of expressions and conjunctions they used). The blog section was also pretty entertaining because we could all read about the themes of all groups and there was always something new that you didn’t know or could learn. I think it was a good call the choice of such main themes (all concerning everyday life’s problems and realities) but at the same time I have to recognize that some of them were really complex to deal with while speaking and reading in language, maybe a few themes concerning also pop culture could have been a nice alternation.

Overall I’m really content with my experience and I’d like to thank everyone who took part in it both from Italy and Japan. I really had fun while also learning every week something new.