RiCOGNIZIONI. Rivista di Lingue e Letterature straniere e Culture moderne

The “Teacher Education Course” for the Training of In-service Teachers of Foreign Languages and Civilisations

2023-07-17T17:08:04+02:00

The paper presents the TEdu (Teacher Education Course) proposed by the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Modern Cultures of the University of Turin in the academic year 2021/2022. The author, coordinator of the Course, briefly illustrates the idea, the structure and the outcomes of the first edition, dedicated to the topic of inter-personality.

Parish Maps

2023-07-17T17:08:55+02:00

Our paper aims at illustrating specific ways of mapping surrounding landscape using the Parish Maps. Named after the parish, the smallest unit in a community-based area, they appear as a subjective means to render the outer space. In fact, since they were first experimented by the English Association "Common Ground", they have been used with the specific purpose of revealing the dwellers' point of view on the area they live in: the underlying idea, in fact, is that our landscape is made of different and unique points of view conveyed by those who concur to its making. On the basis of our research experiences over a span of almost 20 years of work using the Parish Maps within the framework of local communities, we believe that these maps can prove to be a useful tool in education contexts too

Spoken language corpora for teaching German

2023-07-17T17:08:37+02:00

In the field of German linguistics, several important contributions have been published in recent years focusing on the value of spoken language corpora for language teaching (e.g. Costa 2008, Römer 2008, Paschke 2018, Günthner/Schopf/Weidner 2021, Fandrych/Meißner/Wallner 2021). Taking these theoretical approaches as a starting point, the contribution intends to highlight the often neglected potential that spoken language corpora offer for DaF teaching in secondary school and how they can be used as a database for designing thematic CLIL contents in secondary schools, by proposing some language teaching applications taken from the corpus Fluchtgeschichten aus Ostpreußen (FGOP) edited by Lucia Cinato and available on the Datenbank für gesprochens Deutsch (DGD) platform of the Institut für deutsche Sprache (IDS) in Mannheim.

The Self and the Other

2023-07-17T17:09:47+02:00

The aim of this contribution is to show how Literature can fruitfully explore the relationship between Self and Other through an analysis of the interconnection between waste and wasted lives (Bauman, 2004). The first case study takes into consideration Katherine Boo’s 2012 reportage Beautiful Forevers, set in the Mumbai slum of Annawadi. The American journalist describes the lives of the outcasts and the untouchables on the edge of the megalopolis. Similarly, the second case study analyses a selection of poems by the Northern Irish writer Derek Mahon, which show his concern for both material and human waste, through a parallel with the Italian poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Offering some critical tools which combine literary analysis with anthropology and sociology, we will show how to organize a teaching module to training the younger generations to diversity as a source of mutual relational inclusion.

Communicative Competences and Interpersonal Relations

2023-07-17T17:10:20+02:00

The Communicative Approach or CLT was a revolution in applied linguistics in the 1990s and is still the last theoretical framework in TEFL. It aroused great enthusiasm at the time but was also subject to some criticism. In Italian Secondary Schools it was never fully applied and did not leave a relevant mark on the didactics of the English language. At present, most Italian university students in foreign languages and literatures, and future teachers of English, still show the imprint of a traditional language learning experience that owes much to deductive reasoning, a structural syllabus, and even the influence of the Grammar-Translation Method. This essay investigates the reasons why CLT was not so successful in the Italian context, considers its future prospects in the current “post-method” period, and envisages possible solutions for an effective approach in language teaching that combines tradition and innovation, the achievement of institutional requirements and of students’ interaction, and the development of communicative competence and accuracy.

Transcultural Literature as a Means to a New Didactics of German Language

2023-07-17T17:15:59+02:00

Published during the COVID-19 pandemic, Yoko Tawada’s “Paul Celan and the Chinese Angel” pays homage to the German-speaking poet Paul Celan by depicting the strange liaison between the obscure university researcher Patrik and his evanescent friend and counter-ego, Leo-Fu. Together, they join forces on a sentimental journey through Celan’s work and life. Within the theoretical context of the transcultural shift in the Humanities, the present article aims at presenting teachers of German as a foreign language with the newest literary concepts in the field of translinguistic literature. Therefore, the article focuses on the literary analysis of the novel and underlines its trans-textual entanglement with Paul Celan’s poetics in order to sketch an alternative path to the Didactics of German Literature.

Introduction to FLE (Français Langue Étrangére)

2023-07-17T17:16:30+02:00

This paper is an introduction to FLE, French as a Foreign Language, as it has been illustrated to secondary school teachers during the TEdu course. In this brief overview, we present the potentialities of this disciplinary and research field, highlighting the articulation between theory and didactic practice, so as to enrich the pedagogical practices of teachers, with a specific focus on the linguistic corpus and the didactic application of large oral corpora of spoken French.

Education for Relationships

2023-07-17T17:16:45+02:00

The article briefly describes the structure and development of the two training meetings in the pedagogical field related to the first edition of TEdu. The topic of the course - interpersonality - recalls the importance of the educational and formative relationship at school, with particular attention to the dynamics subsequent to the pandemic crisis. Starting from reciprocity as a key category of the relationship, the article illustrates the reasons for choosing the writing of the logbook as a tool for teachers, analyses the device in its main components and proposes a synthetic reading of the outcomes of its use.

From the Past, the Present

2023-07-17T17:17:18+02:00

The main aim of this article is to discuss the conceptual frame of Bildungsroman in France: usually considered as having risen at the end of 18^th century and faded at the end of 19^th, concerning a male hero searching his place in the world, this kind of novel has been put in relation with a specific lapse of time and kind of society. We wish to propose a new approach to the French roman d’apprentissage, starting from contemporary texts and moving back to 17^th century. The model of Bildungsroman can be reframed starting from its characteristics, showing the links between the contemporary coming-of-age novel and the novel of Ancien Régime: this will also allow the didactic use of nowadays narrative to approach the more complex narrative of the past centuries.

Comparing the Experiences of University Teachers and Students in Synchronous Hybrid Settings During and after the Pandemic

2023-07-17T17:19:38+02:00

Among the many innovations, teachers and students experimented widely for the first time with synchronous hybrid settings, which took hold in the second year of the pandemic (20-21). Although synchronous hybrid education is nothing new, it was neither widespread among practitioners nor established in the literature. This mixed method study aims to contribute to the body of knowledge about a format which was already studied before the pandemic as a convenient way to make tertiary education more inclusive, which is consistent with the 2030 Agenda goals regarding equity in education. To this end, it compares data collected during and after the pandemic on teacher and student approach towards synchronous hybrid teaching and learning combining quantitative and qualitative data. The opinions on synchronous hybrid education obtained during and after the pandemic do not differ. On the one hand, students and teachers in the three data collections mentioned the same challenges of synchronous hybrid settings. On the other hand, they see the opportunities differently. For teachers, the disadvantages in terms of workload, stress and effectiveness do not outweigh the opportunities in terms of student attendance. In contrast, students tend to favour synchronous hybrid teaching and learning because it could improve their quality of life, if not their learning.

From the Physical to the Digital Library

2023-07-17T17:20:07+02:00

As part of the author’s archive, Giono’s physical library is a source of extratextual information that should be taken into account for the interpretation of his late novels, particularly in regards to his sociopolitical views. The volumes containing the reading marks represents, in fact, an intertextual context for the novels, and the presence of numerous political works contrasts with the authorial image associated with a disengagement starting from the end of Second World War. Within the digitalization pipeline, which aims at the publication of the digital edition on the web of a selected number of political texts, the present article focusses on the extraction of machine-readable text from the image files, describing how the transcription process is carried out automatically by the creation and application of a HTR model with Transkribus. We will provide a description of the ground-truth material inserted, the parameters set and the training of the model, the results of multiple trainings as well as examples of the transcriptions. The resulting model is ready to be used for future transcriptions, enabling the efficient digitalization of a great number of volumes from the author’s library as well as other documents from his archive.

Cognitive Processes and Paralepsis

2023-07-17T17:20:24+02:00

This paper has the dual purpose of outlining the case history related to paralepsis in literary texts, highlighting the different possibilities of application and the narrative effects that derive in any case towards a transgressive fantastic alteration, and of trying to update the referential system drawn by Genette in 1972. For that, we will draw on some postulates and principles of linguistics and cognitive narratology, applying them to two specific stories by Michele Mari, Josef K. and Lamento del guerriero, when we will show how unexpected informations offered by a particular character (bottom-up vertical paralepsis and internal horizontal paralepsis) produce metaleptic shifts that dis-locate and re-locate the reading around different attractors that transgress the fictional logic (Remorini 2023).

Germano Proverbio (1924-2020). A Mentor, a Friend

2023-07-17T17:19:22+02:00

In memoriam Germano Proverbio (1924-2020)

[rev. of] C. SEELIG, "Briefwechsel", a c. di P. Dietiker e L. Gloor, Suhrkamp, 2022

2023-07-17T17:21:14+02:00

[rev. of] C. SEELIG, "Briefwechsel", a c. di P. Dietiker e L. Gloor, Suhrkamp, 2022

[rev. of] A. MOLLICA, "Ludolinguistica", 3 voll., Eli-La Spiga, 2019, 2020, 2020

2023-07-17T17:21:28+02:00

[rev. of]

Anthony Mollica, Ludolinguistica. I giochi linguistici e la didattica dell’italiano, volume 1, prefazione di Tullio De Mauro, postfazione di Stefano Bartezzaghi, Loreto, Eli-La Spiga, 2019 - ISBN 978-88-536-2713-1

Anthony Mollica, Ludolinguistica. Imparare la lingua con i giochi di parole, presentazione di Massimo Vedovelli, prefazione di Tullio De Mauro, postfazione di Stefano Bartezzaghi, Loreto, Eli-La Spiga, 2020 - ISBN 978-88-536-2714-8

Anthony Mollica, Ludolinguistica. Parlare e scrivere con creatività, presentazione di Luca Serianni, prefazione di Tullio De Mauro, postfazione di Stefano Bartezzaghi, Loreto, Eli-La Spiga, 2020 - ISBN 978-88-536-2715-5