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.

Overcoming difficulties in subject identification in the Italian language

Identifying the subject in a sentence, especially if the subject is not obvious, is difficult for secondary-school students. The apparent simplicity of this topic might cause one to consider it lightly; however, it should be considered generative for textual comprehension, for the production of cohesive and coherent texts, and for moving from parataxis to hypotaxis. Traditional grammar equates the syntactic notion of subject with the semantic notion of agent and with the communicative notion of topic, giving rise to possible misunderstandings.
The present article offers a proposal that allows one to solve any ambiguity, developing a trajectory with two phases. Firstly, by using a functional criterion within the language (i.e., going from the singular to the plural of the sentence terms), students can correctly identify the subject. Secondly, through a semantic analysis carried out in competence-heterogeneous groups, students inductively comprehend the complexity of the function of “subject”, thereby linking the semantic criterion with the syntactic one.
This analysis, only initially teacher-led, fosters learning by discovery, which brings students to an active, inclusively realised construction of knowledge, and it allows each student to work within their zone of proximal development. This method overcomes traditional “normative” grammar and enhances the student’s centrality: students are not given a ready-made description, but, rather, they are encouraged to build one by actively acting upon on the language.