Italian Conversation & Composition

Catalog description

This course reinforces and strengthens linguistic proficiency, cultural fluency and critical thinking skills in a focused and sustained manner. The course enriches specific intermediate-level skills for more advanced use: it targets description (people, objects, places), summary and narration of events in all time frames, and articulation and defense of an opinion in conversation and debate as well as in writing. The course goals are achieved through reading, discussion, and written analysis of magazine and newspaper articles, narrative prose, poetry, and also film from the Italian-speaking world as well as public speaking. An increasingly nuanced mastery of grammar, style, expression and gesture through activities carefully aligned with the course’s target areas also factors into the development of a critical voice and a sense of how meaning is created and transmitted.