Teaching the uses of Italian verb forms to Slovene speakers

Abstract

Goethe's paradoxical aphorism concerning our knowledge of complex phenomena could be used to identify the feelings which may prevail at two different stages oflearning a foreign language, at an early and at an advanced one. So, for example, it is not surpris­ ing when our students, back from an exchange visit abroad, complain about having felt blocked by their thorough structural language awareness, noticing at the same time that some other foreign students showed off their fluency and richness of vocabulary, while calmly violating certain grammatical conventions. 1 Such self-conscious learners seem to miss their past lack of inhibitions, when they still naively thought oflanguage differ­ ences principally as neatly observable dissimilarities in language forms, feeling that their present awareness of more hidden foreign-language properties is rather a disadvantage in communication; so much so that they wonder whether it would not have been better to have invested all that time and energy into the acquisition of the lexicon instead.

Syntax mentioned seven times in the CEFR – and how many times at school, in foreign language classrooms?

“…From the linguistic point of view, there are quite a few, mainly contrastive, studies concerning teaching Italian and Spanish complex-clause syntax to Slovenian students (for Italian, see Miklič 1992Miklič , 2003Miklič and Ožbot 2007;Lenassi 2004; for Spanish, see Markič 2006;cf. Correia et al 2013 for Portuguese), or to learners with a Serbian or a Croatian linguistic background (Samardžić 2006).…”

Attività rivolte allo sviluppo e al consolidamento della competenza metalinguistica nell'ambito dell'italiano commerciale (Naloge za razvijanje in utrjevanje metajezikovne zmožnosti v okviru pouka poslovnega italijanskega jezika)

“…Per quanto riguarda gli stadi successivi, questa diventa una competenza esplicita a livello formale-descrittivo; a testimonianza di ciò vengono dati i seguenti esempi: »In italiano gli aggettivi possono essere a quattro, due o una uscita«, »Se fossi venuto ti saresti divertito è un periodo ipotetico dell'irrealtà.« (Sull'uso della terminologia e le sue implicazioni per l'insegnamento a proposito del periodo ipotetico cfr. Miklič 1994, Miklič 2008, Miklič/Ožbot 2007 5 Cfr. anche Fielding-Barnsley/Purdie (2005) che usano il termine metalinguistic awareness, metalinguistic knowledge e knowledge of metalinguistics e Kunst Gnamuš (1992: 58-59) che usa il termine conoscenza metalin guistica (slov.…”