Dr Gianfranco Conti
Italian Sentence Builders is a workbook aimed at pre-intermediate to intermediate students. It is co-authored by three modern languages educators with over 60 years of extensive classroom experience between them, both in the UK and internationally. This ’no-frills’ book contains 15 units of work on very popular themes, jam-packed with graded vocabulary-building, reading, translation, retrieval practice and writing activities. Key vocabulary, lexical patterns and structures are recycled and interleaved throughout. Each unit includes: • a sentence builder modelling the target constructions; • a set of vocabulary building activities; • a set of narrow reading texts exploited through a range of tasks focusing on both the meaning and structural levels of the text; • a set of retrieval-practice translation tasks; • a set of writing tasks targeting essential micro-skills such as spelling, lexical retrieval, syntax, editing and communication of meaning.Based on the E.P.I. principle that learners learn best from comprehensible and highly patterned input flooded with the target linguistic features, the authors have carefully designed each and every text and activity to enable the student to process and produce each item many times over.Alongside the macro-units you will find: • Question-skills units: two pages on understanding and creating questions. These micro-units occur after every unit in the book, so as to recycle the same question patterns in different linguistic contexts; • Revision workouts: these are retrieval practice tasks aimed at keeping the previously learnt vocabulary alive. They too occur at regular intervals, after every other unit.Please note that both The Language Gym and SentenceBuilders.com websites are ideal supplements to this booklet. Both websites recycle every single lexical and structural item found in this book many times over via self-marking vocabulary and reading workouts, in addition to engaging and fun games and a powerful verb trainer.
