The integration between language and literature teaching: a proposition in order to teach Italian language as a foreign language in an university course of Letters / Da indissociabilidade entre o ensino de língua e de literatura: uma proposta para o ensino do italiano como língua estrangeira em cursos de Letras

Elisabetta Santoro

A lot has been written on the integration between language and literature teaching, and between linguistic and literary studies. Nevertheless, we can observe that the separation between language and literature persists, although literature cannot be thought outside the structures of language and language develops in literature its highest potentialities. Many methodologies for foreign language teaching suggest that the acquisition/learning should begin with texts that use language with utilitarian function and, only later, texts with poetic function. This thesis hypothesis is, on the contrary, that a language course can be always based upon texts with poetic function. Therefore, texts have not been used as pre-text and as source of grammatical structures, since the idea that guided the preparation of the pedagogical material used during the lessons is that the growing of the capacity of interpreting texts takes place simultaneously with the acquisition of linguistic structures. In order to test this conviction, two groups of Brazilian students of Italian Language and Literature of a university course of Letters were followed along a whole experimental program with a duration of three years. In this course Italian language and literature were studied in an integrated way on the basis of literary texts analyses, accomplished with the principles of French semiotics. During the course the students built a more and more autonomous relation with the texts, observing and analyzing the structures which organize the meaning and the discursive functionality of the grammatical facts and, at the same time, took possession of the foreign language. At the end of every cycle of lessons the students produced their own analyses of the poetic texts used in the classroom. These analyses were examined in order to verify, at one side, the linguistic competence through the measures of fluency, accuracy, complexity and lexical variation; and, at the other, the discursive competence, that is, the capacity of the learners to notice relations in the interior of the text and the meaning effects that they produce. The results have showed the effectiveness of this way of teaching that bases upon the analyses of literary texts. It was registered a development of the interlanguage of the students shown through the increase of all the measures results, besides an improvement of the capacity in the text analyses which brought them to reach a growing proficiency as text readers and producers.

AUTOR(ES)

DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

RESUMO

ASSUNTO(S)

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

Documentos Relacionados