Portfolio > La culture italienne
La culture italienne
Portfolio
This course is imagined to be part of the activities organised by an Institute of Italian Culture abroad to promote Italian culture in the world. The main objectives of these institutions are, in particular, to offer courses about the Italian language and culture and to organise cultural events aimed at helping people discover Italy and its cultural, artistic and scientific heritage.
Each of the 3 modules deals with a different theme and the activities are imagined to be completed in a given order.
Have fun!Idiomatic expressions
In the first activity an interactive presentation introduces some Italian idioms. Italians, like all peoples, use idiomatic expressions in informal and formal situations, in their daily life and at work. These expressions are part of the culture of the country but they are not always present in “standard” language courses. Audio files accompany the expressions to reinforce learning.
The gestures
In the second activity, the course offers an interactive video showing some of the most common non-verbal expressions used by Italians (there are 250 of them!). The video also proposes questions at regular intervals to reinforce learning. The transmission of knowledge is done through positive reinforcement (points for each correct answer) and negative reinforcement (the video comes back in case of a wrong answer, as a punishment), according to the behaviourist model.
The food
The course ends with some of the most famous dishes of the Italian tradition, travelling across the country from North to South. As with the idiomatic expressions, audio files accompany the images to reinforce learning. This activity is presented in the form of “flipping cards”. The learners see the image of the dish, can read its name and listen to it. Then they turns the card over and learn the origin of the dishes and their main ingredients.
To create this course I’ve downloaded some pretty cool graphics from Freepik. The music track – Tarantella Lucana by Italian Village Music and Dance – is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, and available on The Free Music Archive.
A more detailed description of this work could be find on my “Report page“, available on the Geneva University Server.