Il Balboni

A communicative Italian course for foreigners.Traditional aspects: short-stepped lessons, organized according to the three fundamental language development stages in the Unit: comprehension, analysis and synthesis.Innovative features: emphasis on oral comprehension, inductive approach, focus on language development stages.

• Every Unit is divided into Steps . Every Step is a language acquisition unit, i.e. a minimum block of contents which can be covered in 2-3 hours, in addition to homework, and is organized according to the natural language acquisition stages:- a global, intuitive, general comprehension stage, featuring several visual memory aids;- perception gradually shifts from global to analytical, and focuses on specific aspects; very often the analysis concerns the elements which have been introduced intuitively in the previous Stage;- synthesis, which in the opening units is necessarily minimal, but which, in Unit 3, turns into a space for thinking and systhematising.• The Guardiamoci intorno sections — two or three per Unit — focus on civilisation . In the first Units they are extremely synthetic, but then deal with topics such as work, the school system,the landscape and cities.The Guardiamoci intorno sections only feature vocabulary activities and do not contain any grammar exercises .• The Palestra di italiano consists of a set of recapping exercises, with links to supplementary online exercises.