Avanti! Beginning Italian / Edition 3

by Janice Aski, Diane Musumeci

Overview

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 students can see Italian society and culture in action.

Student-centered Classroom: A significant goal of Avanti! is to engage the learner inside and outside of the classroom and promote students' personal sense of responsibility to interact with the material and maximize learning. To this end, the inductive presentations of vocabulary and grammar, which encourage language processing and cognitive engagement, can be successfully completed in the classroom or by using the interactive versions in Connect.

Administrative Challenges: The Avanti! program provides the online tools to reduce the amount of time and energy that instructors have to invest in administering their course. The Assignment Builder allows instructors to easily sort activities according to a variety of parameters that are important to them, including by learning objective, language skill, topic, amount of time on task, or by activity type (multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and so on). With Reports instructors can pull full administrative reports about students' performance, and coordinators will be able to integrate these reports across all sections to see the performance of the entire program. The at-risk student report also allows instructors to quickly identify at-risk students, based on numerous criteria, who may need additional help to successfully complete the course.

*Connect Italian, including but not limited to the workbook/lab manual, LearnSmart, the video program, and chat tools, is sold separately and does not come automatically with the purchase of the textbook.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780073386263
Publisher:	McGraw-Hill Higher Education
Publication date:	01/01/2013
Pages:	544
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 11.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Janice M. Aski is Professor and Director of the Italian language program at The Ohio State University. She specializes in world language pedagogy and historical Italian/Romance linguistics. Her research in world language pedagogy has focused on topics such as L2 testing, reading, grammar practice activities, and hybrid vs. in-person instruction. She now focuses on the incorporation of intercultural competence training in elementary language courses and how this training provides new messaging to support world language study. Her publications in historical Italian/Romance linguistics focus on the social, pragmatic, and cognitive aspects of phonological and morphosyntactic change.


Diane Musumeci is Associate Professor Emerita of Italian and SLATE (Second-Language Acquisition and Teacher Education) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During her academic career, her teaching, research, and publications focused on the acquisition of Italian as a second language, content-based instruction, and the history of second-language teaching. She enjoys conserving and sharing several acres of woods with her family and an assortment of wildlife.

Table of Contents

Capitolo 1 Per cominciare
Strategie di comunicazione
Greeting someone
Finding out someone’s name
Finding out where someone is from
Saying good-bye
Expressing likes and dislikes
Alphabet and pronunciation
Months and seasons
Numbers from 0 to 9,999
Strutture
Gender
Indefinite articles
Number
Definite articles
The verb piacere
Cultura
Per saperne di piùGenderNumber
Capitolo 2 Com’è?
Strategie di comunicazione
Asking how someone is
Asking someone’s nationality
Lessico
Describing people, places, and things
Strutture
Adjectives
The verbs essere (to be) and avere (to have)
There is / There are
Possessive adjectives
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Adjectives
Irregular plural adjectives
The demonstrative pronouns questo and quello
Other adjectives that precede the noun
The verbs essere (to be) and avere (to have)
Capitolo 3 Cosa ti piace fare?
Strategie di comunicazione
Getting someone’s attention; Asking and telling time
Asking when events occur
Saying what you like to do in your free time
Lessico
Talking about your daily activities
Strutture
The infinitive of the verb
The present indicative of regular verbs
Verbs with spelling and/or pronunciation changes
Irregular verbs
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Irregular verbs
The verbs rimanere (to remain) and scegliere (to choose)
Capitolo 4 Che bella famiglia!
Strategie di comunicazione
Meeting people and finding out what they do for a living
Commenting on things and complimenting people
Lessico
Talking about your family
Strutture
Possessive adjectives
Possessives with family members
Interrogatives
The interrogatives quanto (how much) and quale (which)
The present indicative
More irregular verbs
Adjectives
The comparative
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Suffixes
The comparative
Comparatives of inequality with che
Comparatives of equality
Capitolo 5 A tavola!
Strategie di comunicazione
Inviting someone to do something
Declining an invitation and making excuses
Lessico
Restaurant terms and items on an Italian menu
Strutture
The superlative
Verb + infinitive
Prepositions
The partitive
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Prepositions
The preposition di
The preposition da
The pronoun ci
Capitolo 6 I vestiti e la moda
Strategie di comunicazione
Making polite requests
Asking permission
Lessico
Describing your clothes
Strutture
Direct and indirect objects
Present progressive
Reflexive verbs
Adverbs
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Adverbs
Molto and poco
Buono/cattivo versus bene/male
Capitolo 7 Cosa hai fatto questo weekend?
Strategie di comunicazione
Expressing surprise, pain, and so on
Asking what happened
Lessico
Talking about your weekend activities
Strutture
The present perfect of regular verbs
The present perfect of irregular verbs
Negative expressions
Cultura
Per saperne di più
The present perfect
Sapere and conoscere
Piacere
Negative expressions
Other negative expressions
Capitolo 8 Che bella festa!
Strategie di comunicazione
Asking for information
Expressing good wishes
Lessico
Talking about Italian and American holiday celebrations
Strutture
Reflexive verbs
Reciprocal verbs
The present perfect
The present perfect of reflexive and reciprocal verbs
Definite and indefinite articles
The use of definite and indefinite articles
Prepositions
The prepositions in and a
Cultura
Per saperne di più
The present perfect
The present perfect of dovere, potere, and volere
Prepositions
The pronoun ne
Capitolo 9 La scuola e i giovani
Strategie di comunicazione
Finding out someone’s future plans
Describing how things used to be
Lessico
Talking about education and professions
Strutture
The imperfect
The imperfect versus the present perfect
The past progressive
Cultura
Per saperne di più
The imperfect versus the present perfect
da/per + expressions of time
Sapere and conoscere
Capitolo 10 La vita e il benessere
Strategie di comunicazione
Expressing regret
Expressing regret, sorrow, and making apologies
Lessico
Activities, hobbies, and well-being
La salute
Strutture
Using the present to talk about the future
The future
Hypotheticals of probability
Cultura
Per saperne di più
The future
The future of probability
Capitolo 11 Casa dolce casa
Strategie di comunicazione
Managing conversations
Seeking approval and expressing hesitation
Lessico
Describing Italian houses and furniture
Strutture
Object pronouns
Indefinite pronouns
The relative pronoun che
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Object pronouns
Object pronouns and the present perfect
Indefinite pronouns
Indefinite adjectives
The relative pronoun che
The relative pronoun cui (whom/which)
Capitolo 12 In città
Strategie di comunicazione
Expressing opinions
Lessico
Talking about Italian cities and towns
Strutture
The present perfect of irregular verbs
The past absolute
The imperfect versus the passato prossimo
The imperfect versus the past absolute
The comparative
The irregular comparative
Object pronouns
More about the verb piacere
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Object pronouns
Double object pronouns
Capitolo 13 Andiamo in ferie!
Strategie di comunicazione
Expressing wishes and desires
Making suggestions and giving advice
Lessico
Talking about vacations
Strutture
The present conditional
The informal imperative
The formal imperative
Cultura
Per saperne di più
The present conditional
The past conditional
Capitolo 14 Chi sono gli italiani?
Strategie di comunicazione
Talking about what people do in general
Explaining how things are done
Lessico
Talking about Italian society today
Strutture
Si + verb
The present subjunctive
Verbs and expressions followed by the subjunctive
Cultura
Per saperne di più
The present subjunctive
More irregular verbs in the subjunctive
Verbs and expressions followed by the subjunctive
a/di + infinitive
Capitolo 15 Quali lingue parli?
Strategie di comunicazione
Asking and verifying whether someone can do something
Recognizing regional varieties of Italian
Lessico
The languages of Italy
Strutture
The past subjunctive
The subjunctive versus the indicative
Hypotheticals of possibility
Cultura
Per saperne di più
The subjunctive versus the indicative
Conjunctions followed by the subjunctive
Hypotheticals of possibility
The imperfect subjunctive
Capitolo 16 Sono famosi
Strategie di comunicazione
Making recommendations
Lessico
Talking about historical people and events
Strutture
The infinitive and present indicative
The present perfect
The imperfect
Object pronouns
Cultura
Per saperne di più
Object pronouns
Stressed pronouns
Pronominal verbs and the idiomatic expressions: andarsene, farcela, and avercela con qualcuno