escription
ITLN 111 is an 6-credit intensive Italian language for course designed for beginner students with little or no prior study in Italian. The goals of this introductory course are to give students a basic lexicon to interact with everyday life, events and activities of their new host country by teaching them 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 students with the necessary tools by which they can engage—little by little—with the local community in a meaningful way, and to stimulate students to observe and reflect upon the various aspects of the new culture surrounding them. 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. Students 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
ITLN 111 meets four days per week (Mon-Thur) and consists of a morning program of two hours of in-class grammar study, followed by two hours of exercises and conversation in the afternoon. In the evenings and on some Fridays, cultural activities and lectures in Italian are scheduled. For details of these events, please see the accompanying description of the liberal arts cultural component to the program at the end of 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, 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 Outcomes and Objectives
At the end of the session, students should reach the level A2plus of the Common European Framework in the four basic competencies: listening, speaking and interacting, reading, and writing. In practice, the student 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: I. Fratter, C. Troncarelli, Piazza Navona: Corso di italiano per stranieri (libro dei testi e della grammatica). CIDEB Edizioni.

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 in via Mazzini has a number of dictionaries available for consultation.