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.

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.