My name is Maddalena and I am Italian. I moved permanently into this country three years ago. The first time I came into the U.S. was in 2002 on a student visa valuable for a year. During that time, I attended English, Spanish, and French courses at Temple University and International House at Penn University. At the same time, I taught Italian for the America-Italy Society of Philadelphia. This experience was very enriching and I will always hold it in my heart. Back in Italy, I continued my studies at the University of Florence pursuing a major in Intercultural Studies. Since I moved back to the U.S., I decided to complete my degree online, transferring my academic credits from the University of Florence. I decided to enroll in an online program because I believe it suits well my learning style. I am, indeed, a self-taught. I love studying independently and I am very responsible and able to complete tasks on time. Also, having already attended classes successfully, I feel confident about my learning abilities. I taught Italian for the Chester County Night School. The experience was very rewarding. I held classes for beginners, intermediate, and advanced. I was entirely in charge of the program for each class. My students were mainly adults and I really enjoy teaching to them. Having adult students is very challenging because they come to class with different education backgrounds. I try to customize the lessons as much as possible adopting different teaching styles simultaneously. I am a grammarian. However, what I enjoy the most about teaching my mother language is to guide my students discovering the culture behind the language. For this reason, I believe that a mother-language speaker can be fully able to teach a foreign language, especially Italian. In fact, due to our relatively young history as unified nation, Italy has a variety of dialects and traditions that have influenced the official language, in its syntax and phonetics. Therefore, being a native speaker is critical to the teaching experience. Another important aspect that I would like to underline is my education background strongly oriented toward Classical studies. In fact, I studied Ancient Greek and Latin, which provide important explicative information for the etymology and the syntax of the Italian language. I also have experience teaching children and teenagers.