4/8 Task

I am using the BBC Italian Steps program. My objective during this task was simply to try to understand as much of the dialogues as I could without having to look at the transcripts. I am now taking an introductory Italian class, so I have a little (very little, I should say!) knowledge of basic Italian grammar. Therefore, I basically just wanted to put myself to the test to see how much I could understand. The BBC program is set up so that the learner first views a slideshow along with a recorded dialogue. Although I found the slideshow to be of interest, I also found that it interfered with my ability to concentrate fully on the conversations. I decided to close my eyes and listen carefully to the dialogue; doing so allowed me to focus all of my attention on the conversations and I found that in most cases, I was able to understand what was being said. If I couldn't understand it the first time around, I replayed the section until I was able to get it. In cases when there was something I couldn't understand no matter how many times I listened, I pulled up the Italian transcript to see if I could then piece it all together. Once or twice I encountered a word or phrase I was not familiar with and had to check the English translation. In most cases, however, I was able to discern the meaning by context. At the end of each slideshow, I went back and listened to the entire conversation a few more times. One thing that I found frustrating with the program was that after advancing on to the next frame of the slideshow, the learner is no longer able to go back to a previous frame until the end of the entire slideshow. This was a minor problem, though, which I was able to work around by jotting down any new vocabulary I had encountered. After the slideshow there is a section called "Guess the Words" which was a little too easy and not much of a challenge. Following that I did the "Build the Sentences" section in which the learner has to drag words to fill in the blanks in sentences. I wasn't crazy about this part of the program, either, since a lot of the words keep bouncing back to their original positions if they aren't placed "just so" - rather annoying! After that I focused on the "Speak and Write" section. This part of the program provides one part of a dialogue and requires the learner to produce the other half. Being in the computer lab, I felt too embarrassed to actually produce the spoken part aloud, so just ran the words through in my head. There is an option for checking what the correct answers are before moving on to the writing section (which uses the same dialogue), but I decided to move on to the writing section without first checking my answers, just to make it a bit more challenging. I didn't bother trying to figure out how to type the accents, although the site did provide a little help window which explained how to do so. At the end of each section there is a "Challenge" which puts everything learned in four slideshows together. All in all, I found it to be quite useful and also lots of fun.