Italian Studies in South Africa

IL PLURILINGUISMO COME VALORE: INTERSEZIONE TRA LINGUISTICA EDUCATIVA E POLITICA

2023-07-18T18:55:22+00:00

UN PROGETTO DIDATTICO PLURILINGUE. LA SCUOLA ITALIANA A TIRANA, ALBANIA

2023-07-18T19:30:00+00:00

This contribution gives an insight into the makings of a multilingual school by
focusing on the early phases of the project, the didactic planning and the
bureaucratic aspects. The author analyses the Italian-Albanian historical
relationship, dwelling on the development of the teaching of Italian language in
Albania during the last decades. A brief panorama of the current international
Italian schools around the world introduces the steps that led to the birth of the
Scuola Italiana a Tirana, followed by its various activities as a cultural and
learning centre, culminated in the affiliation of the school with the Dante Alighieri
Society. The last part of this contribution is dedicated to the didactics, methods,
techniques and strategies currently used in the Italian School in Tirana and its
future perspectives.

PLURILINGUISMO ENDOGENO O MONOLINGUISMO IMPERIALISTA? UNO STUDIO DI CASO IN UNA SCUOLA PRIMARIA NELLA PROVINCIA DI BANTEN (INDONESIA)

2023-07-18T19:44:33+00:00

The present chapter focuses on teachers’ attitudes towards multilingualism in
a primary school in the province of Banten, Indonesia. It represents only a small
piece of the complex sociolinguistic and educational patchwork concerning
multilingualism in this ‘superdiverse’ country. The aim is to provide an overview
of the attitudes of primary school teachers and their implicit role in spreading a
culture of multilingualism, focusing on their view on indigenous languages and
Indonesian, the national and official language of the country, analysing both
their understanding of multilingualism and the pedagogical aspect towards
multilingualism. Data has been collected through the usage of a questionnaire
with various statements concerning multilingualism, as well as its perception
and teaching, which the informants had to agree or disagree with. The results
of the survey have been looked at from a double perspective: the perception of
endogenous multilingualism, and the established and/or desired pedagogic
practices. I argue that even though there is an apparent widespread positive
opinion of multilingualism and indigenous language maintenance, the teachers’
actual attitudes highlight that the importance and hegemony of Indonesian
outweigh the willingness to maintain the indigenous languages, and it leads to
an ‘imperialist-oriented’ view in favour of the sole language representing unity
and identity.

LE SCELTE LINGUISTICHE DI ALCUNE FAMIGLIE CON BACKGROUND MIGRATORIO IN ITALIA: USI, COMPETENZE E ATTEGGIAMENTI NEI CONFRONTI DEL MULTILINGUISMO

2023-07-18T19:55:46+00:00

The present paper aims to investigate how language use among families with
a migrant background in Italy varies over time, focusing in particular on the
distinction between daily communicative practices and literacy-related ones in
each language of the family’s linguistic repertoire. The study is based on the
analysis of an extensive sociolinguistic questionnaire considering the use of
one language or the other across different contexts over time, each family
member’s assessment of their own language competence as well as their
attitude towards each language and the importance of being multilingual. The
results show that the children of the interviewed families experience
“harmonious bilingualism” (De Houwer, 2020), especially as far as their
communicative practices are concerned. It is not always the case that this
corresponds to a positive attitude towards multilingualism among the parents.

IL PLURILINGUISMO NELLE POLITICHE LINGUISTICHE ITALIANE: IL CASO DI BOLOGNA

2023-07-18T20:00:16+00:00

This contribution aims to illustrate the application of European language policies
in favour of multilingualism in the Italian context, taking as an example the case
of the metropolitan city of Bologna. This is a particularly virtuous case,
considering that it is the urban area with the highest concentration of people of
foreign nationality in Italy. The contribution is divided into three parts: in the first
part social and educational advantages of multilingualism are presented, then
it is provided a delineation of European language policies and their reception
by Italian institutions, whereas the final part describes some examples of good
practices of multilingual education experimented in the metropolitan area of
Bologna.

TRA CODING E CODICI: UN’ESPERIENZA DI ÉVEIL AUX LANGUES TRA INTERDISCIPLINARITÀ E SVILUPPO DEL PENSIERO COMPUTAZIONALE

2023-07-19T15:49:29+00:00

The paper reports an educational experimentation inspired by the pluralistic
approach Awakening to languages, which has been carried out in an Italian
primary school. The project’s main objective is to enhance linguistic diversity
and, at the same time, to develop students’ computational thinking through a
coding game created with Scratch 3.0 software. The activities presented intend
to show the potential of an interdisciplinary and plurilingual perspective that
intertwines three different educational axes, generally separated in the school
curriculum: education to environmental sustainability, education to linguistic
diversity and the cognitive value of languages, education for an active use of
information technology.

L’IDEOLOGIA DEL MADRELINGUISMO NELL’ACCOSTAMENTO ALLA LINGUA INGLESE IN CONTESTO PRESCOLARE

2023-07-19T15:49:31+00:00

The present paper explores the concept of native-speakerism, which has been
described by Adrian Holliday (2006) as “a pervasive ideology within ELT,
characterised by the belief that ‘native-speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western
culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English
language methodology”. The first section discusses some theoretical issues
related to the definition of a ‘native speaker’, while the second section provides
an up-to-date literature review of the ideology of native-speakerism and its
effects in English language teachers and learners. The third part presents the
results of a study which involved a group of educators who regularly expose
preschoolers to foreign languages and were required to fill in a satisfaction
questionnaire at the end of a training course. The analysis revealed traces of
native-speakerism in some answers and free comments, as well as forms of
cultural resistance and counter-framing.

JOSEPH FRANCESE, The Unpopular Realism of Vincenzo Padula.

2023-07-18T20:06:50+00:00

Last Pages

2023-07-19T11:15:37+00:00

Last Pages

Front Pages

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