2009-2010 Grant Proposals
Antonio Barbagallo
"Teaching Italian as Foreign Language: a
Communicative Approach" Workshop for Italian Language Teachers
Project Proposal:
• The Education Office of the Italian Consaulate and Northeastern University (Boston) have organized a series of “Pedagogy workshops” for the teaching and learning of the Italian language. The workshops center, above all, on the usage of authentic multimedia texts in the Italian classroom, in order to potentiate base and integrated communicative abilities. Multimedia materials offered by institutional Italian agencies, in particular those of RAI (Italian National Television), will be used to demonstrate the many ways they can be used to enhance teaching of language and culture.
• The workshops will also offer participants the opportunity to exchange didactic experiences in the teaching of Italian. The object of the workshops is to work on a curriculum that will center on language and culture teaching with the aid of the above mentioned technical support.
Workshop components include 15 hours in class lessons with researchers and practicing teachers discussing how the standards play out in day-to-day classroom situations, and interactive activities on the Web. The three main thematics of the workshop are:
•Development of oral comprehension, production and interaction
•The use of the Web: integrating Internet-based reading materials in the
curriculum and using the Web for the cultural competence
•Teaching contextualized grammar
•The workshops will be of great benefit to the Stonehill students who are studying Italian, because I will be bringing to class materials and techniques that are new and up to date. All this in light of the fact that the Italian Government (through its Consulate) is offering these workshops free of any registration fees.
• Whatever I learn will be brought to campus and will be shared and discussed with other faculty who are teaching Italian, and my guess is that much information can be shared with faculty of other languages
• The workshops run on January 16 and 21, and on February 4 and 13, in the afternoon at Northeastern University, Boston Campus.