Education / Certificates
Master degree in italian literature, TOEFL certificate (english), DALF certificate (french), CEDILS certificate (italian as a foreign language), TFA (italian and latin high school teaching credentials)
Teaching Approach
I am a highly motivated open-minded person and a distinctive trait of my character is the suppleness in adapting to new situations as also apparently demonstrated in the French and German high school educational systems which were completely new for me and different when compared to the Italian one. As a matter of fact I always adapted methods according the level, the aptitudes and the inclinations of the students in order to rouse their interest using my cultural background, definitely humanistic, and exploiting the use of music, films, literature as teaching materials. I have a deep interest in social economic and political events mainly in the Italian reality but the European Union and world reality is also usually considered. This interest is expressed in a blog of which I am a co-founder and active member. This skill was used, using newspaper and magazine articles as well as videos, to introduce the Italian current events to the students giving them the chance to improve their conversation and debate skills on some current and/or historical affairs and/or aspects also in a comparative sense. ) During my assistantship in Dijon, France, I’ve made use of several methodologies and techniques to teach my language, adapting them according to the level of the students, their interests, the goal the teachers set themselves for the classes (even though they used to leave me a wide freedom of action). I had classes with students of age between 15 and 20 attending high school and classes preparatoires at grandes ecoles (designed by the acronym CPGE). For instance, with the beginners and intermediate levels the main purpose was to improve their communicational skills in Italian: so, for this kind of students, I used to act in a more playful and informal manner, proposing various playing-oriented activities aiming to stimulate them to express themselves as more naturally as possible, such as role-play games. For example, a kind of game that generally amused the students and used to get satisfactory results was to make them invent short comic stories on the base of a combination of images they were given. Sometimes, I made use of songs in order to develop their oral comprehension skills, analyzing the lyrics with them after 2 or 3 listening essays. With the more extroverted classes I even played the guitar and sang with them the song listened and analyzed before. Obviously, because of the different requirements, with the higher level classes (in particular with preparatoires) I made use of different methodologies and techniques. In this case, I preferred to use newspaper and magazine articles as well as videos in order to introduce the Italian current events to the students giving them the chance to improve their conversation and debate skills on some current and/or historical affairs and/or aspects also in a comparative sense. However, as I wanted to improve their knowledge of the Italian culture, I used sometimes to show them excerpts of some among the most important Italian movies, the choice of which was also based on their effectiveness to represent the peculiarities of Italian civilization and its evolution through the years, as well as some periods of the Italian history.
