Italian Primary Sentence Builders – Book 1 (The Language Gym – Sentence Builder)

Italian Sentence Builders – Primary – Book 1 contains 10 units which concern themselves with a specific communicative function, such as ‘I can say my name and age’, ‘I can talk about the weather’, ‘I can say what’s in my town’. You can find a note of each communicative function in the Table of Contents.

Each unit includes:

• a sentence builder modelling the target constructions, introduced by questions to guide communication;
• a set of Listening-As-Modelling activities to train decoding skills, sound awareness, speech-segmentation, lexical-retrieval and parsing skills;
• a set of reading tasks focusing on both the meaning and structural levels of the text;
• a set of translation tasks aimed at consolidation through retrieval practice;
• a set of writing tasks targeting essential writing micro-skills such as spelling, functional and positional processing, editing and communication of meaning.

Each sentence builder at the beginning of a unit contains one or more constructions which have been selected with real-life communication in mind. Each unit is built around that construction but not solely on it. Based on the principle that each E.P.I instructional sequence must move from modelling to production in a seamless and organic way, each unit expands on the material in each sentence builder by embedding it in texts and graded tasks which contain both familiar and unfamiliar (but comprehensible and learnable) vocabulary and structures. Through lots of careful recycling and thorough and extensive processing of the input, by the end of each unit the student has many opportunities to encounter and process the new vocabulary and patterns with material from the previous units.

Alongside the units you will find: No Snakes No Ladders tasks created to practise speaking skills with an engaging and fun board game that can be photocopied and played in groups of 3 students.

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