Two new impressive resources aimed at L2 learners of Italian of secondary schools (years 8 – 12), produced by CO.AS.IT.

Resource 1 Un tema scottante: Il cambiamento climatico e l’ambiente

A collection of teaching activities designed to address the issue of climate change and its effects on the environment. This resource for senior students features activities for writing, listening, reading and speaking. The exercises proposed will enhance specific vocabulary and language structure on the topic.

This resource is particularly useful for those schools which have registered for the United Nation Model Conference of which you should already be aware.
However, it is perfectly suitable to be used as a stand-alone resource on the topic of Global Warming and Climate Change.

Resource 2 L’Italiano con YouTube

This collection of 50 reflection-based activities associated with YouTube clips is designed to develop language and communication skills. This work is the result of the commitment of the 2015 Co.As.It. Italian language assistants and it has been revised by Co.As.It. staff in order to enhance its validity and usefulness in class. The project is motivated by the fact that, despite the focus of a multimedia teaching approach, there is a general lack of resources based on audiovisual material. We believe that this collection helps fill that gap. The YouTube videos offer teachers the opportunity to present students with attractive, entertaining, and current Italian language and culture.

The following criteria has been adopted in the selection of the video clips:

• a wide range of socio-cultural content and topics;
• varied language input and exercise complexity;
• various activities and testing techniques;
• diverse genres, registers, types and domains of the spoken texts.

Disclaimer: Permanently downloading YouTube videos

Since the resources in L’Italiano con YouTube are based on YouTube clips, we strongly recommend that you download the videos as soon as possible since we only provide the links and we cannot guarantee their long term availability.
There are several methods to downloading YouTube clips. One of the simplest is to go through the following website: http://www.onlinevideoconverter.com/video-converter. Copy and paste the video url (contained in the body of each exercise) into the “video link” bar, select the output format in the “settings” bar (we suggest *.mp4) and click on the “Convert” button. After conversion the file can be downloaded by clicking on the “Download” button. The file will be saved to your “Download” folder.

It is important to highlight that even if the videos are already supplied with a thorough range of exercises, their use in class might be extremely different according to the aims of the teacher and the interests and levels of the students. Therefore, we suggest that teachers preview the content, examine the material and adjust it according to the specific needs of the class.