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OUR TEACHING METHODOLOGY It has become fashionable in teaching foreign languages to adopt a "total immersion" approach, by which is meant that the student should learn the foreign language "from the inside", without any reference to the language he already speaks, much like a baby learns his native language. Thus translations have become passe', as have references and comparisons to the student's native language. And it has become fashionable to try to extract "conversations" from the student with the very first lesson. We believe that there are circumstances where this approach is justified: clearly this is the way to go if the student is surrounded by speakers and media of his language of study, and/or if the student is very young. In our circumstances, however, with classes meeting once a week and with adult students already heavily invested in their native language, we believe this is the wrong approach. Translations and parallels between languages can be useful study aids where the circumstances for "total immersion" are not realized, and adult students can rely on analytical skills and historical knowledge which are not available to young children. As for "conversations", it is disingenuous at best to expect a new student to "converse" in a language he does not know. It leads to false expectations and ultimately to frustration and discouragement. This does not mean that a new student does not learn words and phrases right off the bat. He does: he learns the pronunciation, he learns the grammatical structure, he learns the semantic content, and he commits a vocabulary to memory - but all this is not yet "conversation". These, then, are the building blocks we develop during the first year in preparation to being able to "converse" during the second year:
Italian for English speakers is hard. We cannot promise you even the beginning of fluency unless you commit to a fairly rigorous and lengthy program. In fact, beware of those who promise you fluency in a matter of weeks with "easy" lessons, online or otherwise, and with magical formulas that allow you to learn a language "in minutes a day" while having "fun". Remember the story of the young girl who asked a maestro, on a New York street, how to get to the Met? The reply was "practice, practice, practice"! This hold true for foreign language study. While we will never stop you from enrolling in our courses, if you are looking to become fluent in Italian after a few weeks of "easy fun" we would rather you enrolled elsewhere. Another important aspect of our approach to teaching Italian is this: we we do not dwell at length on irregularities and exceptions to general grammatical rules. Too often we have seen countless hours spent on enumerating minute and rare exceptions to general rules, while vast tracts of the language went unexplored. And we have learned that retention of abstract grammatical exceptions is poor. Much more effective, we think, is to expound the general rules well and thoroughly, and handle the exceptions as they occur. This approach allows much material to be covered that would otherwise have to be omitted in a one-year course, with minimal impact on the proficiency of the student and with a greater likelihood of long-term retention. with best regards Mario Fusco
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