Our Story and What We Do
Twin Cities Italian (TCI) is a one person idea that came to be after a few years of incubation. Laura’s extensive experience in teaching college level language courses and her fascination for language acquisition and the Italian culture all combine to make TCI the perfect place for people to explore Italy off the beaten path.
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Twin Cities Italian offers group and individual lessons at the novice, intermediate, and advanced proficiency level as per the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines. The Italian culture is woven into the lessons. Classes are designed and customized to the interests and needs of students whether it is for traveling, business or life-learning purposes. ​
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Both face-to-face and online classes are designed with student centered pedagogy and practices aimed to offer a great student learning experience.​ Twin Cities Italian designs and develops its own learning material in electronic version based on students' interests, pace, and learning approach. Student feedback drives the creation of the study material.
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Online sessions are designed following online learning pedagogy; Laura uses Google docs as a class repository where students will have access to all resources needed for their class - syllabus, media, handouts, and grammatical resources. The first ten minutes of your session are a tour of how things work in the online environment. Online sessions meet synchronously with Zoom.
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If you want to know more about Laura, check out her bio and blog.
What Do You Want to Know About Italy?
Twin Cities Italian currently offers a variety of group courses such as "Crash Course for Travelers", and "Off the Beaten Path in Italy". These courses are a combination of specific cultural information and language instruction. The idea is to equip students with language skills that will allow them to enjoy their experience of Italy not as tourists but as cultural savvy travelers. This allows you to perform daily tasks in your target language like, for example, using public transportation, ordering at a restaurant, and attending local cultural events (the Palio in Siena is one of the most well known, but there are hundreds of others all year long, like the local "sagre"). The courses can center around a specific geographic area with its points of interests, outdoor activities (like hiking, skiing, etc), and other interesting focuses like agriturismi, wine, and olive oil production.
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Additional group courses with other topics may be designed based on student interests in the Italian language and culture. Group courses are formed by students of the same proficiency level: novice, intermediate, and advanced. Different age groups like adults and children (for example families) are welcome in the class, as long as they are at the same proficiency level. In order for a course to take place there have to be at least four students.
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