Avanti: Beginning Italian and Connect Access Card - Tapa dura

As the fastest growing introductory Italian title, Avanti! Beginning Italian continues to evolve to meet the changing needs of instructors and students. Professors are offering more hybrid and online courses, technology is providing functionality we could not envision just a few years ago, and the types of students we teach are ever-changing. Thus, in planning the third-edition revision, it was critical to retain the best parts of our program while responding to the changes around us.

The title Avanti! conveys the forward-thinking approach of this program, which is designed to guide experienced and inexperienced instructors in creating a truly communicative, interactive environment for their students. In preparation for this edition, we employed a wide array of market research tools to identify a number of areas for digital innovation. As a direct result of our research, this new edition offers McGraw-Hill's Connect™ and LearnSmart™ with their game-changing, adaptive, and digital learning resources. These powerful, digital tools, now an integral part of the third edition, complement and support the goals of the Avanti! program and address the needs of the evolving Introductory Italian course.

How does Avanti! with Connect and LearnSmart support the needs of Italian instructors and students?

Communicative Competence: One of the major challenges of any introductory language course is to give students ample exposure to the language and sufficient opportunity for speaking practice to inspire them to communicate with confidence. Avanti! satisfies students' desire to communicate in everyday situations right from the start. In Connect Italian students have access 24/7 to the digitally enhanced eBook, the interactive textbook activities, the online Workbook / Laboratory Manual activities, all of the accompanying audio and video resources, and the voice tools that allow for out-of-class practice of important oral skills.

Review and Recycling: Since introducing and practicing each grammatical structure once in a year-long course is simply not enough to promote acquisition, recycling vocabulary and structures for maximum exposure is a key feature of Avanti! Every fourth chapter provides practice of four previously taught grammar points, which are then followed by a related topic. With the addition of LearnSmart, a super-adaptive learning system, students can practice key vocabulary and grammatical structures outside of class. This powerful system helps students identify their weaknesses and provides them with an individualized study program based on their performance.

Manageable Scope and Sequence: Avanti! responds to instructors' concerns that most programs attempt to cover too much material in the first year. We have designed an elementary course that reflects reasonable expectations for the amount of material that most beginning learners can acquire in one year of classroom instruction, while providing the necessary practice students need to acquire these structures. The Connect Italian platform includes an assignment builder feature that allows instructors further flexibility to fully customize the course content to meet the needs of their particular students. Instructors may choose to assign all (or a subset) of the textbook and workbook activities as well as some or all of the grammar points presented in Per saperne di più based on their course goals.

Cultural Competence: Avanti!'s meaningful and extensive exploration of Italy's rich and unique culture is fully supported in Connect Italian through audio and video resources and interactive activities. Throughout each chapter, brief readings and interactive, culture activities promote an understanding of products, practices and perspectives. All chapters end with reading, listening, and writing activities that explore cultural topics in depth. Each chapter also includes an analysis of film clips where stude

Janice M. Aski is assistant professor and director of the Italian language program at The Ohio State University. She specializes in foreign language pedagogy and historical Italian/Romance linguistics. Her research in foreign language pedagogy explores a variety of topics, such as testing, teaching reading at the elementary level, and how first-year Italian textbooks and grammar practice activities reflect the most current research in second language acquisition. Her publications in historical Italian/Romance linguistics focus on the social, pragmatic and cognitive aspects of phonological and morphological change.

Diane Musumeci is Associate Professor of Italian and SLATE (Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. She received her Ph.D. in Italian linguistics with a Certificate of Advanced Study in SLATE from the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign in 1989. For sixteen years she was the Director of the Italian language program. She conducts research in content-based instruction and classroom language acquisition. She teaches a wide range of courses from Italian language and linguistics to doctoral seminars on the history of second language teaching. She has published numerous articles and chapters in books and is the author of Il carciofo: Strategie di lettura e proposte d'attivita (McGraw-Hill, 1990) and Breaking Tradition: An Exploration of the Historical Relationship Between Theory and Practice in Second Language Teaching (McGraw-Hill, 1997).