E’ Estate… Ora di FLUENCY Classes!
It’s Summer, it’s Time for FLUENCY Classes!
We’ve worked hard all Winter and Spring studying grammar rules, learning new vocabulary and idioms. We did dedicate some time to our conversational skills, but we all know we need more of it, especially now that we want to go to Italy.
Fluency Classes could be called Conversation Classes, but this definition might lead to a bit of a confusion. In fact, these are not places where we go for a chat. Fluency Classes’ purpose is to develop our fluency and accuracy. In order to ensure the full participation of all students we never take more than nine students.
For Upper Beginners and Pre-Intermediate (livello 1 and 2), new vocab, idioms and interchangeable chunks of sentences will be introduced through videos and examples. These will 
be contextualized in a real life situation, so that students can immediately see the usefulness and cement their understanding. The second part of the lesson, consists of one or more conversational based tasks practiced in pairs or groups. The tasks include real life situations role playing, descriptions and interviews. These tasks are great fun and enjoyment is a key element in the learning process (to read more on this read my blog post on this link)
During our work, students will be provided timely, but not pedantic feedback. At the end of the lesson we will highlight the newly learned expressions, vocab and common mistakes we have to work on for the next session.
For other levels, vocab, new idioms and expressions are introduced through games, songs or films. They will be used during our conversational tasks and through games they are memorized. The higher the level the more demanding films, songs and conversational tasks will be.
The use of Italian only is recommended as we know that we think in the language we speak and if a student starts asking questions in English, the whole group have to switch their thinking into English. We all know that we can ask the meaning of what we didn’t understand by saying, for example ‘Cosa significa acqua?’ and the other student can say ‘Acqua significa water’. If we don’t know how to say something in Italian, we can simply say ‘Come si dice I’d like some water?’ the other student or the teacher will answer ‘Si dice: vorrei dell’acqua’. In this way we can still get the info we need, but we pass through Italian… and at the end of our lesson we’ll sound more Italian and our confidence in our Italian will be much higher than when we started… and we’ll also have had fun! Grazie a tutti!
To know more about upcoming classes you can email carolina@italiancork.com