PAU Foreign Language II: Italian (Canary Islands) common mistakes
PAU Foreign Language II: Italian (Canary Islands) · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
In the reading section, the candidate answers each item by matching a single word that appears in both the question and the text, without reading the surrounding sentence, and marks the option that repeats the most vocabulary from the passage.
Under time pressure, lexical matching feels fast and safe, and candidates trained on short-answer drills treat the text as a word bank rather than a source of meaning. Distractors are usually built from exactly this overlap, so the strategy reliably selects the wrong option.
What to do instead
For every item, locate the paragraph, then underline the clause that actually decides the answer and paraphrase it in one short sentence of your own before looking at the options. Reject any option whose support you cannot point to in a specific line. Practise with texts where two options share vocabulary with the passage and only one shares meaning.
The candidate treats true/false or yes/no reading items as statements about the real world and answers from general knowledge (for example, that a Mediterranean diet is healthy, or that a certain city is in the north), rather than from what the text asserts.
School experience rewards prior knowledge, and authentic Italian texts often cover familiar topics (food, family, tourism, environment) where the candidate has strong opinions. The item tests comprehension of the author's claim, not the candidate's.
What to do instead
Before answering, write 'secondo il testo' mentally and find the exact sentence. If the text says 'molti ritengono che...' the author's position is not the same as the popular belief. Train on items where the text contradicts common knowledge, so the habit of returning to the line becomes automatic.
When asked to infer the meaning of an unknown word from context, the candidate either skips the item or guesses from the word's shape in Spanish/English, ignoring the sentence around it.
Candidates are used to looking words up and have little practice with guessing strategies; cognate transfer from Spanish is usually helpful but sometimes misleading, and the candidate has no procedure for deciding when to trust it.
What to do instead
Use a fixed routine: identify the word's grammatical category from its ending and article, read the whole sentence plus the one before, decide whether the context is positive/negative and concrete/abstract, then check the cognate guess against that frame. Build a personal list of Italian false friends with Spanish (burro, salire, camera, fermare) and review it weekly.
In the writing task, the candidate produces a text with correct grammar but no paragraph structure and no connectors, listing ideas as separate short sentences, and omits the required genre features (greeting and closing in an email, opening and closing formula in a letter, title and conclusion in an article).
Classroom practice often focuses on sentence-level accuracy, and the candidate transfers the structure of a Spanish informal message without checking Italian conventions. Cohesion and task achievement are scored separately from grammar, so this loses marks even when every verb is correct.
What to do instead
Memorise one skeleton per genre: for an email, formula di apertura, reason for writing, two body paragraphs with one connector each, formula di chiusura and firma. Draft with a five-line plan (one line per paragraph) before writing. Keep a short bank of connectors (tuttavia, inoltre, d'altra parte, di conseguenza, in primo luogo) and force at least four into every text.
The candidate writes well below the required word count, or pads to reach it by repeating the same idea in slightly different words, and does not reserve time to reread the text.
Time is divided badly: too long on reading, then a rushed production under exam stress. Candidates also believe length alone earns marks, so padding replaces development of ideas.
What to do instead
Practise with a timer: 10 minutes planning, 25 minutes writing, 5 minutes checking, and count words at the planning stage by aiming for a target slightly above the minimum. Develop ideas with concrete examples (a place, a date, a personal experience) rather than repetition, and use the final five minutes for a fixed checklist: agreements, verb endings, accents, double consonants.
In the dialogue or interaction task, the candidate answers the prompt but never asks a question, never reacts to the interlocutor (no 'davvero?', 'che bello', 'mi dispiace'), and uses the same register for a friend and for a professor.
Interaction is usually practised as monologue in class, and the candidate focuses on producing correct Italian rather than on managing the exchange. Register is rarely made explicit, so tu and Lei are mixed.
What to do instead
For every interaction task, plan a minimum of one question, one reaction and one closing move. Decide register before writing: tu with a peer, Lei with an adult stranger, with corresponding possessives and pronouns (ti/Le, tuo/Suo). Rehearse three stock reactions for good news, bad news and neutral news so they come automatically.
The candidate confuses the passato prossimo with the imperfetto, using the passato prossimo for descriptions and background and the imperfetto for single completed events, and mixes auxiliary avere and essere with the wrong verbs.
Spanish and Catalan imperfect/preterite usage is close but not identical, and the candidate relies on feel rather than on the aspect distinction. Verbs of motion and change of state take essere, which is easy to forget under pressure.
What to do instead
Apply two tests before choosing: is the event completed and single (passato prossimo) or habitual/descriptive/ongoing (imperfetto)? And does the verb take essere (movement, change of state, reflexive, impersonals like piacere, sembrare)? Learn a fixed list of essere verbs and drill pairs such as 'ieri ho mangiato' versus 'da bambino mangiavo'.
The candidate writes accents and apostrophes inconsistently: 'e' for 'è', 'perche' for 'perché', 'un amico' for 'un'amica', 'qual e' for 'qual è', and splits or merges words such as 'daccordo' or 'in tanto'.
Accents are often treated as decoration rather than as meaning-bearing marks, and the candidate's keyboard or handwriting habits hide the error. In Italian, the accented form frequently distinguishes words (e/è, ne/né, si/sì, da/dà).
What to do instead
Keep a short list of minimal pairs (e/è, ne/né, si/sì, se/sé, da/dà, la/là) and test them in every written text. Memorise that 'qual è' has no apostrophe, that 'un' before a feminine noun is 'un'' with apostrophe, and that truncated forms (quest'anno, bell'uomo) follow gender and number. Add a two-minute accent-and-apostrophe pass to the final check.
The candidate treats Italian prepositions as a direct translation of Spanish ones, producing 'penso su', 'dipendere da' written as 'dipendere di', 'in il' instead of 'nel', and omitting articulated forms (del, della, degli, nelle, sul).
Preposition choice is arbitrary across Romance languages, and the candidate has learned vocabulary as isolated words rather than as chunks with their prepositions. Articulated prepositions are also skipped because they feel like extra morphology.
What to do instead
Learn verbs and adjectives together with their preposition as a single unit (pensare a, dipendere da, interessarsi di, essere bravo a, innamorarsi di) and review them as flashcards. Drill the articulation table aloud (di+il=del, in+la=nella, su+i=sui) until it is automatic, then apply it in every writing task.
In the sociocultural items, the candidate answers from stereotypes or from Spanish regional knowledge (assuming a 'festa' works the same everywhere, or that all Italians share one cuisine and one dialect situation), and does not distinguish official institutions from local ones.
Cultural knowledge is often taught as colourful trivia rather than as factual information, and the candidate's own national frame fills the gaps. The exam asks for accurate, specific knowledge about Italy and the Italian-speaking world, including regional differences and Italian as a language of communities outside Italy.
What to do instead
Build a one-page fact sheet per topic: national institutions (Presidente della Repubblica, Parlamento, Regioni), major festivals with city and date, geography of north/centre/south, the status of dialects and minority languages, and Italian-speaking communities in Switzerland, San Marino and the diaspora. For each item, ask whether the claim is national, regional or local before choosing.