"Teaching/learning experience"

Teaching is my big passion .The whole procedure of discovering new ways to communicate knowledge to different level of students is fascinating. I would dare to say, the most productive and creative part of our profession. The main desire is my students to love the Italian culture, having as principle tool the Italian language. And this is possible, in my opinion, only through experiential learning. Although the majority of my students is adults, this is not a drawback for having a lesson full of joy and creative activities.

 Based on this theory, my lesson includes audiovisual means, such as videos, music, slides and video recording. A marvelous combination of the Italian culture and language is movies. That’s why they are my student’s and my favorite one. For example, during a lesson, I had removed the subtitles from a part of the movie “la vita è bella” and having divided the class into groups, I asked my students to produce their own version of the dialogue. It was very amusing for them and at the same time, they wanted to learn more information about the director, the actors and the background of the movie.

Another teaching method that we are very familiar with, is role-play activities. This kind of activity is very popular and useful to adults. I have noticed though, that in order that this activity would be effective and the students would participate willingly, teachers should organise the classroom as a theatre team.

To sum up, the material sources and the methods for language teaching are endless. What is necessary is the teacher’s love, eagerness and passion for his/her profession

"my town"

I live near Piraeus, a port city in the region of Attica. Piraeus is the main port of Greece and with a transport of 19 million passengers annually, it is the largest in Europe and third in the world. Piraeus has a long history which dates back to ancient times when it was the port city of classical Athens. Today the port of Piraeus is used only for passenger boats, as it is from there that all tourists and visitors can be transferred by ferries to the islands in the Aegean Sea.
There are many nice places to visit in Piraeus. In the Marina of Zea or Marina Zeas (Pasalimani) one can see parts of the Ancient Walls (Makra Teihi) that connected Piraeus with Athens. The Maritime museum is also situated there. Moreover, visitors can admire parts of the Peiraiki coast.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of my area is “sea”,in greek “θάλασσα”.

I live in Athens, in the zone of Petroupoli that in Greek means Stone City.

My town is situated in the northwestern part of Athens. It is a high spotted place with a great view; you can see the port of Piraeus and also Acropolis from the hill.

Every summer in my town we have the Petra Festival, a big event with many theatrical and musical spectacles. So this period my home town is very vivid.  

Nearby there is also one of the few parks in Athens, the “Environmental Awareness Park” (Tritsis Park) a gem of simple, natural beauty, a welcome respite from Athens’ booming construction and urbanization.

Unfortunately we have no lakes, bicycles or rivers like the most European cities since Petroupoli is a part of a big modern by now city, but we have great weather, sun, good food, very attractive meeting points in many squares and a very special atmosphere full of energy and positive influence.

Of course the historical center, where the ancient Greek civilization was born is very close and the exploration of it never ends...

The word that comes to my mind is ζωηρός, "spirited" in English.

Hi, I’m Anastasia !

I am Greek and I teach Italian as a foreign language. I studied Italian Language and Literature at the University of Athens and then I had my master in Didattica della Lingua Italiana come L2 at the University of Padova in Italy, where I spend two wonderful years! In Italy along with my studies I was teaching Italian to immigrants teenagers in a voluntary association; an experience that will never forget.

For the moment I teach Italian in a private school, in Athens, to elementary and high school students. This year I also started a new working experience as an educational coordinator of a Life Long Learning Program based on Non Formal Education. I love teaching very much but I also like directing and supervising educational programs.

I had the chance to participate to many European projects like Youth in Action Projects and Leonardo da Vinci Program, so this European experience has offered me great new skills.

I always like to incorporate Non Formal Education methodologies in my teaching procedure and I believe that The Ridef and Forum Theater will offer my new cultural stimulus.

I speak Italian, English and I can understand a little bit of Spanish.

I am very excited for this workshop and I am willing to meet you all ! !

Teaching/learning experience

I`m a primary school teacher. Primary classes have a very important role in training and language development and in children`s literacy.

At the age of 6, the child feels attracted to stories, he understands poem’s message and he starts to feel emotions and feelings about the read stories.

The main objective for the primary classes is learning reading- writing using the synthetic analytical phonics method.  This method involves starting with the sentence - the child counts the words, he separates the syllables and indentifies the sounds. The child understands that sounds are heard and the letter is the symbol for the sound.   

For easy learning of letters and reading I used the following strategies:

-modeling plasticine letters,

-copying, transcribing letters, words, sentences,

-composition and writing short sentences,

-ordering of words in sentences,

-writing messages,

-contour tracing letters,

-writing by dictation,

-match word- image,

-coloring letters.

Teaching and learning experience

          First of all, I would like to say that I mostly have learning experience with foreign languages than teaching experience. My experience with languages started when I was born. I know I was born in Romania but my first language is Hungarian. So I grew up speaking this language with my family, with my friends, at the nursery and at the school, but I had to learn Romanian too, because if not, it would be impossible to go shopping, or pass all subjects at school. For me sometimes it was tough to speak Romanian, because the accent is absolutely different, and some of my neighbors were laughing at me when we were young, so gradually I lost my curiosity to improve my Romanian fluency.

             Secondly at school I had English and French lessons.  I have to recognize, that my experience was not very nice.  I was only an 11 year old girl, with eager to learn many things, but the methodology was very unfriendly and rather boring, only memorizing words and the verb tenses. I remember that before going to baccalaureate exam, I told the French teacher, that if she wanted she could fail my exam, because it didn’t matter to me!!

            Nevertheless, thanks God, my life changed, with those bad experiences. After finishing my studies I worked 4 years, as a primary school teacher, where I tried to use different types of methods (games, songs, poems, visiting factories,…) to teach Hungarian and Romanian languages too. 

            After that for personal reasons I started to learn Spanish for 3 months before deciding to move to live in Spain. I have to recognize that when I got to Spain I only understood something but I couldn’t speak. For the first months as I wasn´t working, I went to Spanish lessons for adult people, where the teacher was very charming and helped me a lot to improve my fluency. She was patient, she gave me many photocopies with exercises, she spoke slowly and repeated the times that were necessary. I think the best way to learn a foreign language is living in the same country and being surrounded with people who speak that language. So as I was living in Spain and as I started to work, my fluency greatly improved. Five years ago I bought some Spanish School books and I prepared on my own at home for the exams. It was an extremely good experience for me, because I passed the highest level exam at first, at the Official Language School in Spain. 

            In spite of speaking three languages fluency three years ago I decided to retake my English studies again. Now I finished B1 level, what makes me feel very proud! 

            I strongly believe that over the years the methodology has changed (there´s internet in the classroom and the digital board helps a lot). Today our children have different kind of possibilities to learn any language they want. New technologies help us to learn easily, and develop our knowledge.  We are able to listen to music, news or lessons whenever we want, so in this way the languages ​​ are closer, only depends on us how we use all our means to become familiar with them! (Anna - from Spain).

A little stage

Some experiences about the theatre pedagogics

My pupils are 7-8 years old. We can take for example Charlie Brown: I read the book of him or we watch Peanuts on the video. So we get to know Charlie. Every pupils has got in his mind his own image of Charlie. We begin to draw him.
Then we work either alone or in pairs. I give a box to pupils, It can be a shoe box or a chocolate box.
Pupils begin to create Charlie´s environment; his room or outside space.  We use all kind little things; matchboxes, old wallpapers, everything we find at school etc. When "homes" are ready with beds, paintings on the wall, televisions, sofas etc. children put Charlie to live there. And they can play with these little houses.
Now we can begin to write little stories about Charlie´s life. Later we can perform little plays about his adventures. Usually pupils write first the plays by hand. Then we write them with the computer.
If we have a puppet show we can pre record the dialogue. So all can hear it. The voice of little
pupils is not always strong enough. We use also much music in our plays.

Anne from Finland