ITAL 111 S: Intensive Italian through Culture: Elementary

Note: This course was formerly ITLN 111S.

Course Description
ITAL 111 S is an 8-credit intensive Italian language course designed for those of you with little or no prior study in Italian. The goals of this introductory course are to give you a basic lexicon to interact with everyday life, events and activities of you new host country by teaching you the key building blocks of Italian grammar, while at the same time introducing several cultural aspects that define Italy and the lives of the Italians.

The central objectives are therefore to provide you with the necessary tools by which you can engage—little by little—with the local community in a meaningful way, and to stimulate you to observe and reflect upon the various aspects of the new culture surrounding you. Course activities will include exercises and homework assignments to develop and improve grammatical knowledge; reading and listening activities; and games, role-playing, and interviewing both within and outside the classroom. You will be exposed to various cultural aspects such as regionalism, festivals and traditions, social and political cultures, literature, cinema, style and fashion, music, and other characteristics that define Italian culture in a manner that fosters further understanding and practice of the language.

Course Structure
ITAL 111 S meets four days per week (Mon-Thur) and consists of a morning program of three hours of in-class grammar study, followed by two hours of exercises and conversation in the afternoon. In the evenings and sometimes on Fridays, cultural activities and lectures in Italian are scheduled. For details of these events, please see the syllabus.

Main Grammar Points
In general, the following grammatical elements will be covered:

• Articles (definite and indefinite), adjectives (demonstrative, possessive and interrogative), and nouns and their agreements
• Direct and indirect pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs (some uses), and introduction to the particles CI and NE
• Cardinal numbers
• Conjugation of the active and reflexive forms of regular verbs and the most-used irregular verbs in the following indicative tenses: presente, passato prossimo, imperfetto and futuro
• The present conditional
• Introduction to expressing the hypothetical (first type)
• Introduction to the imperative (the informal form)

Course Objectives
At the end of the session, you should reach the level A2+ of the Common European Framework in the four basic competencies: listening, speaking and interacting, reading, and writing. In practice, you will be able to:

• Participate in simple everyday conversations. Interact with native speakers through a slow and relatively basic speech on familiar topics: asking about personal issues, describing places and feelings, and making choices;
• Understand simple messages related to familiar environments (school, job, family, vacation, etc.). Recognize the main points of a more structured speech;
• Read easy texts of different types, including letters, advertisements, job-offers, diary pages and short newspaper articles;
• Write simple texts on personal daily life and past experiences. Describe briefly more general cultural and social issues, using some specialized vocabulary.

Course Materials
– Required Text: A Course Reader that contains the materials to be covered in the course will be made available
– Supplementary Text: Selected exercises and readings from various textbooks and workbooks will be handed out periodically.
– Dictionary: Students are strongly recommended to purchase an English/Italian, Italian/English dictionary.  The library also has a number of dictionaries available for consultation.