Parliamo in italiano! Corso di lingua italiana per stranieri

2016

Lecturers
Students

Accounting
Arts & Music
Business & Communication
Journalism & multimedia
Medicine & Nursing
Sustainability
Tourism

Autonomous learning
Classroom Context

Italian

Italian

B1
B2

Activity/task
Audio
Picture/Graphics
Test
Video

Vocabulary
Grammar
Pragmatics
Prosody

Listening
Reading

‘Parliamo in italiano’ is a L2/LS Italian course addressed to adults or young adults from level A1 to level B2. The 18 units - suitable either for autonomous learning or classroom context – are developed around thematic categories, which offer the opportunity to engage with everyday communication situations for the A1/A2 levels and specialized communication situations for B1/B2 levels.
Every unit opens with a video (available with or without subtitles and transcription) introducing spoken interactions, whose morphosyntactic, pragmatic, conversational and lexical aspects are analysed, practiced and further investigated in the following sections.
According to one’s own needs, the user can explore freely all the activities, complete the exercises and tests without limitations, thus creating her/his own learning path.
In a classroom contents, the units -which cover listening and reading abilities - can be expanded with speaking and writing activities for further practice on the contents learnt.
Even if they are not created specifically for LSP contexts, selected resources (units) can be fruitfully exploited in a language course for specific purposes (e.g. tourism, medicine, business or art).

The resource was tested by the UNIBO internal group.
Number of students involved: 6 Level A2/B1
Number of lecturers involved: 2

From the level B1 complete course, the following units were chosen, according to the specific diciplines studied by the students:
unità 1 lezione 3 'Sul palcoscenico' (TEATRO
unità 2 lezione 2 'Medici' (SALUTE E MEDICINA)
unità 3 lezione 2 'In prima pagina' (GIORNALISMO)
unità 4 lezione 3 'Un curriculum vincente' (LAVORO E CURRICULUM)

Students were asked to complete the activities and to participate in 2 meetings with the teachers in order to
- clarifying doubts regarding grammar, vocabulary, comprehension,
-evaluating the learning materials in terms of motivation enhancement, usefulness, usability.

The meetings were conducted alternatively by the 2 lecturers: one interacting with the students, the other one as observer.

In general, students evaluated the materials positively: they found the introductory videos (especially with subtitles) very appealing - the strongest point of the course -, and a good progression of the exercises. They thought they were useful for improving Italian as LSP, particularly the technical vocabulary exercises.
On the other hand, they found that some grammar parts were poor (poor explanation, few exercises) and that some listening comprehension activities were not clearly structured.

In terms of usability, they noticed that some audio files were not working and that, in some listening comprehension exercises, the system did not report the errors one by one, but gave just a general answer that ‘some parts were wrong’, obliging to do the exercise from the beginning again and again.

When using this resource, lecturers may use the transcripts to integrate the listening comprehension exercises with a reading comprehension activity and with oral interaction activities (for example, a role play). When necessary, additional grammar explanation and exercises may also be used as integration of the resource.

Besides autonomous learning, the resources can be used in classroom context: as listening and reading comprehension, vocabulary, grammar, phonetics exercises are already provided, lecturers can add topic-related speaking and writing activities.

The selected units for an LSP course could be:
B1 level
Unit 1 Lesson 3 THEATRE
Unit 2 lessons 1, 2 MEDICINE
Unit 3 Lesson 2 JOURNALISM & MULTIMEDIA
Unit 4 Lesson 3 BUSINESS & COMMUNICATION
Unit 5 Lesson 2 SUSTAINABILITY

B2 level
Unit 1 Lesson 1 TOURISM
Unit 2 Lesson 2 CINEMA
Unit 3 Lessons 1, 2,3 BUSINESS & COMMUNICATION
Unit 4 Lesson 1 MEDICINE