C'era una volta: Incorporating Storytelling into a First-Year University-Level Italian Curriculum

This paper presents a small-scale descriptive study of how storytelling was integrated into a first-year college-level beginning Italian course. Premised upon comprehension-based view of language acquisition and, thus, the need to provide learners with communicatively-embedded input, we describe our attempt to incorporate a modified version of Blaine Ray’s TPRS into our curriculum. We provide a detailed description of the design and execution of the project in addition to the positive outcomes frames in terms of increased student engagement and responsiveness, along with greater teacher satisfaction.