Teaching Grammar to Learners of Italian as a Foreign Language with the Use of Corpora

The aim of the paper is to explore the possibility of using corpora in teaching grammar to learners of Italian as a foreign language. The paper presents corpus-based activities used with students of Italian at the Saints Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje in 2016/2017. The hypothesis underlying this teaching approach is that direct and guided use of corpora can raise students’ awareness of the complexity of the phenomena observed as well as present them with resources and methods to explore the language more autonomously. The first part of the paper investigates the use of corpora in language teaching, with particular attention to the use of these resources in teaching Italian as a foreign language. The main section describes the activities on concessives and the context in which they have been used. The final part reports on the observations of the students and addresses the advantages and disadvantages of this teaching approach.

Teaching Italian grammar as a foreign language: a didactic resource

Teaching Italian grammar involves several critical aspects, amongst which is a recurring lack of motivation in students. Therefore, combining the teaching of grammar with the use of potentially appealing resources for students is a challenge for the teacher of Italian as a foreign language (FL). With regards to this, songs represent an important didactic resource; in fact, they can motivate students’ learning, are texts full of linguistic and cultural references (such as the variety of sociolinguistic registers or rhetorical figures), and foster the memorisation of lexical and grammatical structures thanks to their intrinsic characteristics (like rhythm and melody). In order to take advantage of the potentialities of songs, the teacher of Italian as a FL should acquire both appropriate methodological competences and a broad collection of didactic techniques to present the various grammatical topics.
The essay is divided into four sections: the first attempts to explore the teaching of Italian grammar from a humanistic perspective; the second is devoted to the presentation of the critical aspects that characterise it, together with the introduction of some possible solutions, such as the use of songs, which is debated in the third section. Finally, the fourth and last part is concerned with some didactic considerations about how and when to use songs for grammatical purposes.

Contrastive Italian-Macedonian studies: recent advances and future perspectives

The paper aims to present contrastive Italian-Macedonian studies, giving a general overview of the development of these studies, with particular attention to the context in which the first studies between these two languages appeared. A corpus of 60 studies published in the last two decades is analysed in the second part of the paper. The classification of the studies based on the topics covered reveals a prevalence of morphosyntactic, semantic, and translation studies. Contrastive studies related to teaching Italian as a foreign language and studies that introduce other topics are also present in the corpus. The final part of the paper reflects upon the future of this type of contrastive study, especially in light of the recent changes related to the interest in studying Italian in Macedonia.

Towards Academic Writing in Italian as a Foreign Language with the Help of Punctuation Marks Starting from the Uses and Interpretations of Slavic- Speaking Students

This article focuses on the results of a survey on writing experiences during secondary school and the first two years of high school and on the use of punctuation marks in L1 and Italian L2 by Czech and Slovak learners. Students’ past experiences with punctuation marks in L1 and references in Czech/Slovak schoolbooks reveal a strictly syntactic approach; students practise the use of the comma only, which is assumed to have purely separating values. In order to help students develop language skills for academic writing in Italian L2 and to avoid choppy writing and lack of cohesion, the research findings suggest that the teacher should highlight the cohesive/linking values of punctuation marks. The contrastive approach can be useful to a certain degree: up to the point where the punctuation principles of the two languages are equivalent or where they seem to be equivalent.

The Construction of Gender Identity in Textbooks at the Intersection between Gender Ideology and Neoliberal Ideology: A Comparative Analysis of Textbooks for Teaching Italian and Serbian as Foreign Languages

This paper aims to analyse the elements of gender ideology and neo-liberal ideology in a corpus composed of three Italian and two Serbian as a foreign language textbooks. The focus of the study is centered on the representation of activities related to the purchase of clothes and accessories, analysed from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. The results indicate that neoliberal values are sustained through the idea that women are naturally predisposed to be clothes and fashion consumers. On a broader scale, the results implicate that the educational materials taken into examination lack a critical pedagogy approach, and that they do not employ the critical and the transformative potential of education, instead they are limited to the reproduction of dominant ideologies.

Textual Structurization in Italian, Polish, and Italian Written by Native Speakers of Polish: Between Verbal and Nominal Styles

This paper presents some results of a comparison of a sample of Italian texts produced by native speakers of Italian with the following: 1) a parallel sample of written productions of native speakers of Polish; 2) a sample of parallel texts produced in Italian by a group of Polish learners of Italian as a foreign language. The way of textualizing the narrative macro-act elicited with a short comic movie of Mr. Bean that was proposed to the informants in the course of an experiment is investigated. The proposed analyses show that texts produced by Italians have textuality definable in terms of nominal style, while Polish texts and Italian texts produced by Polish informants tend toward verbal style. The results obtained are commented in the light of contrastive-typological considerations aimed to place Italian and Polish within the distinction between endo- and exocentric languages.