The program involves the students attending the Italian high schools and universities are paired up with the students attending the American universities and high schools, partners of ITALengUSA. They meet once a week, on Sunday, from 11:20 am to 12:30 pm ET/ 5:20 pm to 6:30 pm GMT, for a total of max. 10 hours, in virtual rooms (Breakout Rooms) of the ZOOM platform, where they will talk about specific topics in Italian for the first half hour, in English for the second half hour.

​

During the meetings, the presence of the project coordinator and professor(s) in charge is not foreseen because the students themselves will alternately act as "tutors'' to correct each other’s grammar and vocabulary errors and support each other in practicing the two languages, according to the peer tutoring strategy. Nevertheless, the project coordinator and professor(s) in charge can enter the Breakout Rooms of the platform at any time to monitor the activity in progress and possibly provide support in case of difficulty.

​

The topics of conversation will be assigned at the beginning of the week and they will mainly relate to real and everyday life, from simple topics such as family, daily routine, hobbies and leisure activities to civilization ones such as comparing Italian and American holidays and traditions or discussing TV series or movies. Students will be asked to read up adequately well in advance so that the conversation is not left to chance and improvisation, but rather oriented and careful both in the content and the lexical choice.

​

The project will end with a brief conversation articulated as follows: the professor(s) of the American partner universities will test the Italian students’ command of the English language, and the professor(s) of the Italian school will test the American students’ command of the Italian language. Finally, a test will be carried out in order to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the project.

​

Students who have an active attendance rate of no less than 80% (8 hours) will receive a Certificate of Attendance. Monitoring will be continuous, not only through the live online intervention, but also through the administration of interim and final questionnaires (Google forms).