Teaching Colloquial Italian: Approaches And Methodology.

TEACHING COLLOQUIAL ITALIAN: APPROACHES AND METHODOLOGY. Engaging in learning the Italian language often comes as an initially shocking experience for the English mother tongue student: a long list of new grammar elements that simply have no correspondent in their mother language, syntax variations, may easily discourage or scare students away in the early stages of their course. The Italian language does indeed present some challenges for an English student: three different masculine definite articles and three feminine ones, each one of which changing when in plural, where in the English language there'd be one which remains unvaried regardless of gender or number. The situation does not get much simpler with indefinite articles either. Nouns and adjectives which endings change, again depending on gender and number, verbs all of which need to be conjugated! And don't even mention possessive pronouns and adjectives! All this and more, make the English prospective student fear that his engaging in speaking Italian will mostly result to his developing migraines while struggling to put a sentence together word by word, trying to remember to arrange each unit in it in the right way, according to gender and number, person, and so on. A person who has fallen in love with Italy, its people, its culture or even its kitchen and is enthusiastic at the idea of managing to further communicate with the locals in his next visit, probably was not imagining all these difficulties in learning Italian and feels he should not have to put up with all of it. Understanding how much one loves the Italian language and how far he can take his interest in it, only becomes clear with time. And yes, approaching language in more of a playful approach does indeed help motivation to persist or grow. And above all, it is true, that there are different levels of communication, each one essentially satisfying different types of needs. Seen in such perspective, a so called "colloquial" type of use of a language is anything but a discontinuous, trivial, or useless knowledge. It produces communication and it is highly functional. It also undoubtedly requires a radical redefining in the teaching program, method, elements and hierarchy. On the other hand it can prove a pleasantly challenging, and engaging activity for the tutor, providing him the opportunity to experiment on the direct creation of new teaching and conversational sample units and scenarios . Colloquial language evolves faster and in more diverse ways than the official language. Beyond a broad knowledge on the existing printed and audio/video material dedicated to that approach, a tutor must also be ready to constantly implement his material with new samples, and incorporate new and fresh examples of such use of the language in realistic social occasions. In my colloquial Italian courses I generally focus on vocabulary and the basic communication units necessary for that kind of use of the language. This approach will entail a certain prioritising in favour of set phrases and expression and against a more extended use of the grammar. The basic grammar elements which cannot be sidestepped at any level of use of the language are covered and taught through ludic types of (mostly oral) exercises. Even while going through these early and merely theoretic language elements, I always make sure that, at each step, the student has a clear sense of their use in colloquial language, explaining or reiterating where and how they will be used in everyday conversation through short and simple examples of dialogue, expressions and phrases. Once past the basic grammar elements, I almost immediately try to start putting all the newly acquired knowledge and information to practice and use in examples of everyday spoken language. The overall approach to the teaching of the language at this stage aims at the developing, as quickly as possible, of elementary everyday communication abilities in common social circumstances. These are mostly based on set expressions and specialised vocabulary and, structurally speaking, on phrases rather than sentences, in a way that spares the student the burden of dealing with too many verbs, or complicated(and at that stage rather unnecessary) syntactic constructions that, in turn, drag in the use of more complex grammatical components. From that point on, the sessions consist of a 75% to 85% of working on conversation and dialogue samples, the remaining 15% to 25% of it being dedicated to the understanding of any new grammar elements employed in such samples. Generally speaking, beyond the early few sessions of the course, grammar comes after the examples of spoken language, only when it is actually an indispensable part of such examples, and is employed in the aim of understanding colloquial language, rather than the opposite.