May I venture to suggest you have a look also at New Breakthrough Italian
published by Macmillan? I must declare an interest because I wrote it. It is
the completely recast and augmented version of a successful course first
published in 1982. It has a self-instructional tourist bias, but it has also
a solid grammar basis, a rigorously graded program (only two or three basic
concepts per unit) and plenty of exercises. The dialogues are genuinely
unscripted and recorded in Italy. It is the sort of thing that could be,
indeed should be, integrated by the planned use of other materials in the
classroom, and might suit a half-and-half instruction programme such as
Jacqueline Reich envisages. I have used Prego myself, but I find that there
are too many notions haphazardly introduced in each unit, and a fair amount
of grammaticaliano (the sort of Italian one only finds in grammar books) in
the script and the exercises.
Giovanni Carsaniga
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