“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

http://www.audiolingua.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!