Introduction
Summer 2025: work in progress
Benvenuti!
Welcome to Spunti: italiano intermedio 2, a unique program that takes the place of a traditional language textbook. Spunti is a fully designed Intermediate II course for students at Muhlenberg College, and it is available to all college instructors of Italian for use and adaptation. It is a free, comprehensive, coherent, agile, functional, and culturally rich course, and it is also a work in progress, which I keep reviewing and improving.
Spunti for Intermediate II consists of:
- straightforward grammatical explanations;
- printable activity packets for in-class use (in Materiale per il corso);
- interactive exercises for linguistic practice and cultural enrichment for each unit (in ESERCIZI INTERATTIVI);
- sample lesson plans for one semester (in Materiale per il corso)
Spunti literally means starting points, or springboard: the name captures the spirit of this project, which does not aspire to exhaust a topic (when can one ever do that, really?), but rather strives to plant seeds for cultural exploration and intercultural awareness, and enables students to make progress in communicating in Italian.
My approach to language instruction at the intermediate level is interactive, conversational and cultural. Culture (in the form of songs, films, poems, articles, news stories, etc.) is interwoven into everything we do and talk about in this course. The overarching theme of our course is fighting [la lotta], which informs the topics of 20th-century history, war, resistance, crime, immigration, race and identity that we explore.
I wish to thank Dr. Laura Furge, Provost of Muhlenberg College, for her continued, generous support of the Spunti OER series, and all my colleagues in the Languages, Literatures & Cultures Department for their continued cheering on of this project.
For the first half of the elementary sequence, see: Spunti: Italiano elementare 1.
For the second half of the elementary sequence, see: Spunti: Italiano elementare 2.
For the first half of the intermediate sequence, see: Spunti: italiano intermedio 1.
Daniela Viale
July 2025
