The nature of the learners
Students are expanding their social networks, experiences and communicative repertoires in both their first language and Italian. They continue to need guidance and participate in structured, collaborative tasks that both recycle and extend language. Students are gaining greater independence and becoming more conscious of their peers and social context. They are gaining awareness of the world around them and of the relationship of Australia with Italy and other Italian-speaking communities. They are noticing similarities and differences between Italian language and culture and their own.
Italian language learning and use
Students’ pronunciation, intonation and phrasing are more confident, and they access wider vocabulary resources and use non-verbal strategies appropriately to support communication. They participate in shared tasks and purposeful language experiences as well as focusing explicitly on language structures and systems, literacy skills and cultural elements of communication.
Oracy development at this level includes active listening to a range of input from different sources, and building interactional skills such as maintaining conversations, turn-taking, and contributing to discussions with observations and opinions. They learn skills in ‘reading’ language for cultural and contextual meaning. Individual and group oral-presentation and performance skills are developed through researching and organising information, rehearsing and resourcing the content of presentations, and selecting appropriate language to engage particular audiences.
Contexts of interaction
Learners use Italian with each other and the teacher for a range of purposes: exchanging information, expressing ideas and feelings, performing and responding to Italian texts and experiences. They use ICTs to interact with each other and with peers in Italian-speaking communities, exchanging resources and information, accessing music and media resources, and contributing to class activities such as a blog or webpage.
Texts and resources
Learners engage with a range of oral, written, multimodal and digital texts that are increasingly public in nature. They use cues and decoding strategies to assist comprehension and to make connections between contexts, ideas and language within and between texts. They create texts for a range of purposes and audiences, such as emails, dialogues, public signs, presentations and performances. With support, they build cohesion into their Italian production in terms of both content and expression.
Features of Italian language use
Students increase their range of Italian language vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and textual knowledge. They learn how to describe present and immediate future actions, situations and events using familiar verbs. They use adverbs, adjectives and prepositions to create more complex sentences. They develop a metalanguage to describe patterns, rules and variations in language structures.
Learners consider how language features and expressions reflect cultural values and experiences (for example, language variation relating to gender, generation, status or cultural context). This leads to considering their own ways of communicating and to thinking about personal and community identities, stereotypes and perspectives reflected in language.
Level of support
While learners work more independently at this level, ongoing support, including modelling and scaffolding, is incorporated into task activity. Ongoing feedback and review support the interactive process of learning. While first language capabilities are more developed than learners’ Italian language proficiency, learning tasks and experiences need to take account of both their second language linguistic level and their more general cognitive and social levels of development.
The role of English
The use of English, in conjunction with Italian, for discussion, reflection and explanation ensures the continued development of learners’ knowledge base and intercultural capability and provides opportunities for learners to share understanding and experiences.
By the end of Year 6, students interact using spoken and written Italian to describe and give information about themselves, family, friends, home and school routines, experiences, interests, preferences and choices. They share aspects of their environment, express opinions, for example, È buonissimo ...è molto bravo, mi piace di più ..., penso di sì/no, secondo me..., accept or reject ideas, agree and disagree, for example, No,non sono d’accordo! Hai ragione/torto. They ask simple questions, for example, Ti piace? Cosa prendi? Chi viene alla festa? Vieni anche tu? They understand the main points in spoken interactions consisting of familiar language in simple sentences. When speaking, they imitate pronunciation and intonation. They understand short written texts with some variation in sentence structures and some unfamiliar vocabulary. In reading independently, they begin to use context, questioning, and bilingual dictionaries to decode the meaning of unfamiliar language. They connect ideas in different informative and creative texts, expressing and extending personal meaning by giving reasons or drawing conclusions. Students create sentences with some elaboration, for example, using coordinating conjunctions and comparisons to build short coherent texts on familiar topics, for example, La musica di ... è bella, ma mi piace di più ... They write descriptions, letters, messages, summaries, invitations and narratives They use the present tense of verbs, noun and adjective agreements and some adverbs; they choose vocabulary appropriate to the purpose of the interaction, such as to describe, to plan or to invite.
Students use some metalanguage to talk about both linguistic and cultural features. They discern familiar patterns and features of written and spoken language and compare them with English, understanding that language, images and other features of texts reflect culture. They demonstrate an understanding of variation in language use, adapting language forms according to audience and context. They identify linguistic and cultural differences know that Australia is a multilingual and multicultural society, and that dialects are spoken both in Italy and in Italian-speaking communities around the world. Students compare, identify and discuss their responses and reactions in intercultural exchanges.