Albanian Level 4 Advanced

Course description: Advanced is for those who have successfully completed the Upper Intermediate Albanian Short Course or a similar course and/or have developed a sound knowledge of the language through extensive visits to Albania, personal relationships, or working with the language. The course runs over three ten-week terms and each session is two hours long. Linguistic and cultural awareness is reinforced through continuous revision and grammar is consolidated as an integral part of texts, short films, and topics covered on the course. On completion of the course students should be able to get by in Albanian-speaking environments, converse reasonably fluently with native speakers, and to retrieve information from a wide range of authentic materials. The course includes all four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. The course will cover the following:

Topics:

• Albanian culture and society through text, film, and music
• newspaper articles on different contemporary topics
• key events of Albanian history
• major Albanian writers, artists, sportspeople, historical figures, famous Albanian films
• Cultural references: regional customs, arts and crafts, films, essential literature texts

Functions:

• reading, analysing, and summarising authentic texts
• extracting and presenting information from written sources or visual material
• simple analysis of a film orally and in writing, skimming and/or translating newspaper articles of interest, talking about Albania’s history, general culture and important figures in general terms
• reporting on events and matters of public interest
• commenting, debating, criticising written material, news, and events
• speculating, making assumptions
• retrieving and collating information from a variety of authentic sources and media
• negotiating and discussing various points of views

Grammar:

• derivational noun and verb suffixes

• the imperative-subjunctive in a variety of functions: overview

• The optative mood; present and perfect tense

• Admirative mood: present, perfect and pluperfect

• complex sentences and types of relative clauses: overview

• idiomatic expressions and proverbs

• relative order of determiners, adjectives and nouns in noun phrases

• word formation (suffixes, prefixes, infixes, derivation)

Study materials:

• Aspects of the Corrective Contrastive Grammar Jani Pamolli: IBSN 9992700556

• Teacher’s materials

Textbooks: Shqip.Al, Të mësojmë gjuhën shqipe B1 (Textbook and workbook), Universiteti i Tiranës, Fakulteti i Historisë dhe Filologjisë.