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Angelo & Gaia Chiuchiù, Giuseppe & Marion Pace Asciak: Italiano in, Guerra edizioni, 2012.

Schools need to take into consideration the considerable decline in exposure to Italian via television in Malta, especially among the younger generation.

It inevitably implies that materials and techniques used to teach and assess the language must be different when compared to those used in the recent past. Most students who start learning Italian at school would only have had a limited amount of exposure to the language prior to the start of the teaching/learning process.

This is undoubtedly a different situation to the time when Italian used to be the dominant language of TV programmes viewed locally. This situation must be addressed by means of textbooks which can cater for today’s learners’ needs and which can motivate them to approach the language in a stimulating and creative manner, while working on their receptive (reading and listening) and productive (speaking and writing) skills.

The three volumes of the Italiano in series offer activities for learners of Italian of different levels, from beginners to advanced students.

This work is based on the concepts included in the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of References for Languages, a document which has been influential in the teaching of languages since when it was conceptualised in the early 1990s. The tasks in these volumes have also been tried and tested on several learners prior to publication as they are the result of several years of experience of teaching Italian as a foreign language at the Accademia Lingua Italiana (Assisi) founded by Angelo Chiuchiù in 1993.

Chiuchiù is the author of several Italian textbooks, many of which have been used in Maltese schools.

Italiano in is based on a communicative and notional-functional approach to language learning and puts the learner at the centre of teaching activities.

The materials put theories of learning modern foreign languages into practice, as space is provided in order to develop learners’ creativity and their personal initiative.

These volumes also allow learners to associate the teaching of Italian to the internet as a number of activities are either based on websites or encourage learners to delve deeper into the topic being learnt by looking for further resources available online.

The initial phase of each section of the books is based on a text, by means of which learners are exposed to the language in a communicative context.

In the first volume many texts are modified for didactic purposes, in order to include simple language structures directed to learners at the early stages of Italian acquisition.

In the second and third volume several texts are taken from Italian newspapers and magazines, thereby presenting the language in its authentic form while exploiting cultural elements that enable students to familiarise themselves with various aspects of Italian society.

Language exercises follow and grammatical concepts are dealt with through a number of tables and notes which are useful to learners who wish to look into analytical aspects of the language.

These exercises are varied and clearly reach their aim of exposing learners to a number of facets of Italian, while avoiding unnecessary repetition.

In the concluding section of each one of the books there are revision activities as well as examples of assessment sheets which are used for certification of Italian as a foreign language.

While the first two volumes are ideal for students of Italian in local secondary schools, the third volume of the series can be fully exploited by learners who are already in possession of a good level of competence in the language, including adults. The materials also provide insightful information not only of the language but of Italian modern day society.

This series of books is also useful for consultation. Both the grammatical and functional-communicative concepts are useful to teachers of Italian who, through this work, can also strengthen and widen their linguistic and pedagogical competences.

One hopes such models will be adopted in Malta in order to assess languages, even at SEC level.

Italiano in is a comprehensive work that can be used at various levels of local schooling as, while tackling the fundamentals of Italian, it motivates learners to engage further with their studies and to amplify their cultural and linguistic knowledge.