Around Pisa AirPort

How can you select the right town and the right school for your language needs.

Choosing the place where to go on holiday is not the same thing as choosing a place to go to study and have fun at the same time. It is important that it has an adequate balance of entertainment and quietness to allow you to rich both your aims.

First of all: where to go in Italy? Even if everybody speaks Italian”, one doesn’t have to forget dialects. Going to any country to learn its language means to have the opportunity to be exposed and to practice that language even outside the school, so it might be a good choice going in regions where it’s going to be easier to catch what people says around you and there is not much difference between what you have been taught and what you are exposed to.

The second point to think about is the choice between a big city or a smaller town. In a bigger city you might be referred to in English, or
in your own language; you will probably have a wider choice of discos, pubs, cinemas and so on, but you will not have many opportunity to speak with your neighbor, or to be recognized by the person working in that shop or by the waiter of the restaurant where you have decided to
go more than once.

Taking this into consideration, Tuscany seems to be a good place to go. In this region the language spoken is almost the same as the standard Italian and it is possible to find a few town, not so small, but definitely not so big to invalidate your goal.

After choosing the place you have to decide which school.

We suggest you to take into consideration a few basic factors:
- The school has to be recognized from the Italian Ministry of Education;
- The school has to be a member of ASILS (Association of schools teaching Italian as a second Language), as a guarantee the quality of programs and teachers;
- The school has to be a qualified center to prepare students and to let them take the CILS Certificate (Certificate of Italian as a Second Language) of the University of Siena;
- The school has to offer support for extra activities and free time;
- The school has to be offering several different courses, even mixing group and individual courses;
- The maximum number of student in a course has to be lower than 12;
- All the teacher has to be mother-tongue.

The Italian school for foreigners Istituto Linguistico Mediterraneo organizes language courses in Pisa and in Viareggio (on the seaside) since 1981.
The school has all the adequate recognitions and provides programs aimed too meet the special needs of any student, taking care of free time as a productive one in terms of language acquisition.

For more information please check www.ilm.it