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Abstract
This project was conceived as an addendum to the electronic exercises already developed by Professor Tommasina Gabriele for the Basic Italian curriculum. As soon as I arrived at Wheaton College in the fall semester 1999 as a visiting professor, I started using the exercises that were available and I found them stimulating. The students' response was also quite positive: they were diligent in doing the exercises and mostly successful in submitting them into my dropbox on a regular basis. Overall, they seemed to enjoy, or at least to tolerate, this medium as a part of their homework assignment. At that point, I considered that a wider variety of exercises would be a significant asset to the course. Therefore I developed 20 extra exercises by alternating the different formats available through SuperMacLang (SML). The exercises, which span the grammar for two semesters of Basic Italian, contain solid feedback that instantly guides students in handling and manipulating grammar.
Report
I created 20 grammar exercises to incorporate into the syllabus
as a requisite for Italian 101 and 102. Among the goals of this
project there is the will to encourage the use of computer applications
among first-year students so as to make them more competent in
the ever-expanding technological frontiers of the new millennium.
Moreover, it is inspiring to use a different medium to administer
homework assignments. And a medium powerful enough to ensure two
things at the same time: the possibility to create alternative
grammar practice exercises in addition to or in substitution for
the ones offered by the traditional textbooks and workbooks, and
the instantaneous feedback comments that I, as the author, built
into each of the exercises.
As for strategies, I used 3 out of 4 possible types of exercises
that are offered by the SML software: fill-ins, multiple choice,
and matching columns, which I found to be more flexible for the
grammar oriented exercises that I wrote. I covered most of the
grammar points that are part of the curriculum for the beginners'
Italian course: the exercises range from verb tenses taken individually
to a contrastive use of tenses, from object pronouns to comparatives,
from possessive adjectives to relative pronouns, etc... In order
to learn how to use SML, I sought the help of a number of people
at Wheaton. I found my mentor Bernadette Houldsworth especially
"user friendly" and very competent in pointing me in
the right direction with a lot of good pedagogical tips. And I
am also deeply indebted to both Abdul Shibli and Ken Davignon
for getting me started by helping me overcome the initial technical
difficulties I experienced when I first started operating with
the SML program.
The results of my project will shortly be made available in my
dropbox under the labels Basic Italian 101 and 102. Overall, SML
was easy to learn and fun to work with, and I found it a good
and resilient tool for developing ad hoc foreign language exercises.
Finally, since the students are the primary recipients of my project,
I plan to ask for an evaluation of the exercises at the end of
the spring semester and to submit an electronic report of the
findings.
Last updated on
3/30/2000; 3:09:28 PM
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