Italian Language and Culture: Intermediate - Wellesley College

In this language course, you will enhance your Italian language skills, enrich your vocabulary and expand your conversational skills. You will learn how to have exchanges on a variety of topics, and continue your immersion in the Italian culture through unique videos and interviews. You will also become more confident as you continue practicing your reading and writing skills.

This course offers a variety of tools that will help you learn in different ways:

• Situational videos (called Ciak!, which means “clapperboard” in Italian): you will follow eight Italian students in their daily lives and interactions on our campus. What a great way to learn authentic conversational Italian!
• Downloadable Podcasts: become a participant in each Ciak! video and practice Italian when and where you want on your portable device!
• Grammar charts, with or without audio files: study and review grammar through concise, clear and downloadable pdf files, and practice pronunciation with our embedded audio files.
• Short video lessons: as if in a real classroom, learn each new topic with the instructor’s direct guidance.
• Video interviews: learn from various native speakers as they talk about different aspects of Italian culture.
• Short “Letture” (readings): practice reading comprehension while learning about Italian culture.
• Discussion board: your chance to communicate (in Italian!) with other students on a variety of suggested topics.
• Ready to test your skills? Practice and review with a variety of self-correcting activities.

Italian culture is an integral part of this course. Through our interviews and readings you will learn about:

• the origins of the “made in Italy” in fashion;
• Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and poetry;
• the Italian health care system;
• shopping for clothes and food in Italy.

Whether you are a traditional, visual or auditory learner, you will find the tools that best fit your unique way to learn a foreign language.

This course has been successfully taught in different settings to more than 1,000 students: entirely online to Wellesley College alumnae and students, and as a mix of face-to-face and online instruction at Wellesley College and MIT. We are now proud to open it on edX, confident that your learning experience with this unique online course will be as enriching as it was for the many students who have already taken it.

• Expand your conversational skills to have more in depth exchanges in a variety of situations about your everyday life, your current and future plans, your hobbies and interests.
• Enhance Italian reading and writing skills.
• Important grammatical structures such as reflexive verbs, the past absolute (“passato remoto”), relative pronouns, direct and indirect object pronouns, simple future, present and past conditional.
• Italian culture, including fashion, art, poetry, healthcare, and how to shop for food and clothes in Italy.