I can honestly say Yabla is one of the best language learning tools I’ve encountered in 25 years of teaching Italian.
Yabla contextualizes the language. Students learn and remember more when they learn the language in context. This is something that doesn’t happen with typical passages found in textbooks because students are genuinely interested in what they are watching.
In my Italian 101 class, I often assign Daniela’s videos dealing with various aspects of Italian grammar that coincide with what we are working on in our text. I’ll also assign an occasional music video and the accompanying vocabulary review exercises.
Adriano’s elementary videos are also useful to my beginner students.
Beginning with Italian 102 and beyond, I ask students to view two installments per week of a given episode from Italian television such as Il Commissario Manara and I Bastardi di Pizzofalcone. This allows us to complete an entire episode by the end of my 10-week courses.
In addition to viewing the videos, students are asked to complete the vocabulary review, multiple choice, and comprehension questions. I then provide students with additional questions / discussion points that I’ve constructed myself. These serve to encourage writing at home and conversation in class.
On occasion, these questions contain phrases, vocabulary, and grammatical concepts we haven’t covered yet. These situations present students with an opportunity to search for answers to their own questions, and for us to address the new grammar and vocabulary in class.
Students in my intermediate and advanced classes are asked to summarize an installment of an episode a few times during the course of our 10 week classes. In class I ask students questions which they haven’t had an opportunity to view prior to our lesson. As a result they speak Italian with more spontaneity, and they learn to think in Italian on their feet.
In short, using Yabla in the classroom makes me a more effective Italian language teacher, it improves the quality of my classes, and more importantly, it enriches my students’ Italian. Thanks to Yabla my students are regularly exposed to genuine, everyday Italian. Textbook Italian often falls far short of that goal. Yabla more than fills that gap.
If you are interested in studying with Davide, visit https://valentilingua.com