IL CASO ITALIANO: Bringing Real-World Application to the Foreign Language Classroom

REFLECTIONS: “You worked on your Italian. It is time to work with it.”

IMPLEMENTATION: “This semester I am not a professor. I am your employer.” STUDENT PERFORMANCE: “Can I say that we did a good job?”

Massimiliano CirulliFrench, Francophone & Italian Studies

v ITAL 315: Advanced Composition and Conversation is required for Italian majors and minors. It is the second part of a two-semester sequence, the first of which is ITAL 300.

v Enrollment for Spring 2020 was 7 undergraduate students. Students in this class are usually in their junior or senior year, and their specializations are different, ranging from foreign language studies to English, journalism, and anthropology.

v Focuses on class discussion, oral presentations, and writing assignments. Traditionally, writing assignments are essays where students learn how to use the grammar in context and how to develop and express critical thought in a foreign language.

COURSE BACKGROUND OF ITAL 315

ISSUES TO ADDRESS: “Are you really engaged with the material?”

After teaching the first part of the sequence in Fall 2019, my main goal became to have students understand that learning Italian is not just a way to earn credit hours. For Spring 2020, I addressed the following questions:

v How can I challenge my students’ expectations about what writing and speaking in a foreign language is?

v How can I challenge my students’ expectations about what they can do with a foreign language outside of the classroom?

v How can I establish a clear, achievable goal that can go beyond working for credit?

My preliminary work on the syllabus of the new ITAL 315 focused on identifying or creating resources to address my questions. Therefore, I carefully selected new activities and resources considering how well they could fulfill the two new course goals that I had identified for this semester:

1. Execute real-life tasks in order to explore some possible uses of the target language outside of the classroom

2. Plan, organize, and generate texts in the target language using different styles and language registers

My strategies to reach these goals have been:1. Create various oral assignments intended to offer

students a more meaningful application of their skills in the foreign language:v Oral presentation on Italian art at the Spencer

Museum of Art (see pictures)

v Simulation of a job interview in place of the final oral exam

2. Create written assignments with different writing styles to have students experiencea variety of professions:v Novelist (writing a short story)v Film critic (writing a film review)v Journalist (writing a newspaper article)v Translator (translating one of their classmates’

best works)

3. Create an opportunity for students to showcase their work. Interested students will have their best works published, both in Italian and in English, on the website and social media platforms of the Department of French, Francophone & Italian Studies.

Both the timing of this project and the unique nature of the Spring 2020 semester (with classes switching to remote instruction because of the COVID-19 emergency) did not help in gathering much data about the ITAL 315 class as a whole. However, partial evidence gathered seems to attest to the success of the new format of the class:

v While it is too early to define a clear trend with respect to the four language indicators, more than half of the class is showing satisfactory progress in the three grammar indicators, and the two students who showed difficulties in adjusting to different styles at the beginning of the semester clearly improved their performance in the last writing assignment.

v All students will take part in the final publication project.

v All five students who filled out the survey expressed satisfaction regarding the format of the class.

v All four students who filled out the survey and had taken ITAL 300 at KU expressed their preference for the format of ITAL 315 when comparing it with the previous course in the sequence.

Students’ comments:

v “I have been really enjoying the assignments. The oral presentations were very interesting for me and fun to do research on. The short story writing I really liked. For the film review, I love the incorporation of film to the class. Although I didn’t really know how to write a professional film review, this assignment taught me how.”

v “It certainly felt as though the readings were more closely linked to the chapter than in the previous class.”

v On ITAL 315, with respect to ITAL 300, “there is definitely greater variety in projects/assignments, and all the projects/assignments/films etc. all clearly relate back to the coursework.”

At the beginning of the semester, I chose three parameters to analyze my students’ progress:

1. Four language indicators to monitor throughout the semester:

v grammatical agreement v verb tenses choice v use of the subjunctive moodv ability to adjust to different registers and

styles

2. The number of students taking part in the final publication project

3. A survey addressing students’ engagement with the course and their opinions when comparing ITAL 315 with ITAL 300

These pictures were taken during our first oral presentation. Students had to present in Italian an Italian artwork on exhibit at the Spencer Museum of Art. The goal of this experience was to let students perform a real task in the target language, just as if they were visiting a museum together with friends who could speak only Italian.

Getting out of the classroom for this assignment was fundamental for students to feel the experience as real. 60% of the students who filled out the survey chose this assignment as their favorite for the semester, and one of them commented: “I loved the oral presentation at the Spencer Art Museum. Being able to go outside of the classroom and connect with what we were speaking about was great.”

“Why are you learning

a foreign language?”

This project was funded by CTE’s 2020 January Jumpstart