“Listen & Speak” Activities for Elementary Italian Cristina Pausini, PhD, Lecturer and Coordinator Italian Program, Tufts University May 22, 2013

Teaching and Learning Goals  Allow students to get more practice listening to authentic audio materials.  Allow students to check their comprehension of such materials (True/False exercise + Answer Key).  Promote students’ pronunciation and fluency in Italian by producing audio files of their own.

Technology in Action  Audio clips (mp3) uploaded in Trunk (under Assignment).  True/False exercises uploaded as documents.  Students’ audio clips uploaded in Trunk as attachments.  Instructor’s assessment in writing using the dialog box after the assignment has been submitted.

Model Audio Clip from  lingua.eu/spip.php?rubrique6&lang=fr  Languages available: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish

Sample of Student Audio Clip

Outcomes  Benefits: students acknowledged that this activity helped them especially with speaking and pronunciation. They also found their instructor’s comments useful.  Drawbacks: Word documents (True/False questions) could not be instantly opened by Mac Users. Also, time consuming for instructors to grade.

Next Steps  This was a successful pilot that only included four activities over the span of the semester. I would like to add more activities, including video as well as audio clips as models.  Students asked to be provided with the script, a vocabulary list, and better recordings. In the future, I will work to meet these requests.

Thank you!