Italian Archive

Results in BLC Posts

Breaking Boundaries: Global Perspectives, Digital Humanities-Inflected Pedagogy and the Teaching of Italian History and Literature

Spring 2022 Fellow: Zhonghua Wang Abstract This project entails the incorporation of Digital Humanities (DH)-inflected pedagogy into the Italian history and literature curriculum. DH methods facilitate a laboratory-based learning environment that values collaboration, creativity, and transdisciplinarity, and serve as a meaningful analytical approach to rethink the Italian literary canon, and to challenge methodological nationalism and…

Italian by Design: A “Bridge” Course

We have grown accustomed to perceiving the arts and language as very different kinds of engagements: the former transgressive and creative, the latter structured and acquired. This talk presents a blueprint for an advanced Italian language course (102) that approaches language and design as analogous processes. Tracing how the coordinates of space and time are…

Italian in Performance: Opera as a Holistic Framework for Language Pedagogy

From musical references woven into urban landscapes to the use of arias in films, opera has forged a certain idea of Italianness, whether ironic, serious or stereotypical. Because of its powerful cultural reach and multimedial and collaborative dimensions, opera is a gateway to approaching specific aspects of the Italian language. My project investigates the potential…

Interweaving Italian Language and Culture through Historically Distant Memories

This presentation provides an Italian example of the challenges faced by L2 instructors attempting to integrate distant historical memories into their curriculum. Meeting this challenge requires the development of activities that contextualize these narratives while bridging the past and the present by engaging with learners’ own values and experiences. Building on this understanding, students can…

Lecture by Alessia Blad, February 14, 2014

Blended learning: a new (and better) approach to beginning Italian Alessia Blad, University of Notre Dame The study of foreign languages faces numerous opportunities and challenges in today’s increasingly globalized world. In the United States, many foreign language programs are disappearing or in decline. Meanwhile developments in technology and the creation of new media challenge…

Lecture by Clorinda Donato, January 31, 2014

Teaching Romance Languages through Intercomprehension: Networking Hearts and Minds in the Language Classroom by Clorinda Donato, California State University This presentation will discuss how the strategies of Romance Language Intercomprehension are being adapted to the North American context to teach French and Italian to Spanish speakers at California State University, Long Beach. Topics to be…

Results in L2 Journal Articles

The Importance of Bridging

In this article, I will discuss the importance of the fundamental aspect of “bridging” in the wider context of language teaching. I will use “bridging” particularly in terms of cultural differences and underline the pivotal role of specific techniques, in a language class as well as in a pedagogy class or seminar, to help finding common ground between groups of people with different backgrounds...

The Acquisition of Verbal Agreement in Instructed Italian L2A

Researchers propose that L2 learners acquire the abstract features of agreement at relatively low levels of L2 proficiency (Bruhn de Garavito, 2003a, 2003b). However, some argue that there is also evidence for the use of default forms in learners’ errors (McCarthy, 2007, 2008), and that these may be predicted based on ...

1 2