What happens in the mind when a person learns Italian as a foreign language
Lecture
Introduced by: Anthony J. Tamburri Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute of Queens College, CUNY and Professor of Italian & Italian/American Studies.
The topic pertains to the field of neurolinguistics, but it will be dealt with from the teacher’s perspective.
Teachers have to help students to acquire Italian, i.e., to store words, grammar, speech acts, cultural models into their brains and minds – and knowing how the brain and the mind work in language learning becomes of paramount importance in order to let teachers work properly so that learning will take place.
The second part of the talk is based on the fact that the hardware and the software of language acquisition, i.e. the brain and the mind, need power in order to work. The power needed to activate them in order to learn something is motivation. Motivation is fundamental to support the long and hard effort of learning a new language, and in the case of Italian emotional rather than instrumental motivation can set brain and mind in motion.
Paolo E. Balboni has taught Language Teaching Research and Methodology for almost 40 years both in Italy and in many countries, focusing especially on Italian as a FL. His works are among the most widely used in Italian teacher training, and the centre he has founded to support Italian in the world, ITALS at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, is a reference point for teachers and researchers from all countries. He is the Vice-President of the World Association of Foreign Language Teachers and the President of the Italian Society of Language Teaching and Educational Linguistics.
He has written widely on all topics of language education, i.e. the teaching of mother tongues, of modern and classical languages, of language policy in the EU and in the world, of intercultural communication as the new frontier of the communicative approach, and so on, ranging from epistemological and theoretical studies to classroom methodology and the use of technology to help language acquisition and maintenance.