What does the title mean? What do you already know from this topic? Can you come up with a list of relevant words or sentences or even paragraphs?

It’s also ok at this stage to acknowledge gaps in knowledge and accept that lots of this content will be new to you.

Listen once and JUST LISTEN.  No notes, no pauses, no looking ahead to the activities.  After the first listen, jot down your ideas on what it was about - even if it’s a guess - and any words or phrases that you heard. Don’t panic, judge or give up if the first listen is a challenge

Open up the activity sheet and complete JUST the vocabulary section - this is connected to the audio file and will start to give a bit of context.  Listen again and see if you can hear the words in the vocabulary list. Has it helped you to understand a bit more?

Look at the activities and decide which tasks you want to complete today - you don’t have to do all of them in one go. In fact, you don’t ever have to do all of them and that’s fine! There are a range of tasks of varying difficulty to suit learners of different abilities. You can come back to the task months down the line if today a task is too challenging.

Once you have completed a task or two and checked your answers, listen again and follow the transcript.  This is NOT cheating. Notice the intonation and pitch as well as the rhythms.  Listen to small sections and develop your speaking by copying the way that the speaker delivers the texts. 

Now read the text aloud and record yourself (most mobile phones have a record function) and listen to how it sounds.  Compare yourself to the audio file, noticing where you make mistakes - and working on correcting yourself. Remember to also congratulate yourself on how brilliant you are too when you get it right!

Test yourself on the vocabulary and challenge yourself to learn some of the new words; can you put them into sentences?

Depending on your level, you might want to have a go at translating.  Use the English version and see if you can translate any parts of this back into Italian. Use this as an opportunity to re-visit rules on word order, adjectival agreements, tenses and, well anything else that you have learned but not yet mastered.

Come back to the listening and JUST LISTEN.  Do you now understand more of it? You can follow the English translation too, by the way, and see if you can marry it up with the Italian that you are hearing.