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Dec.26/04 - Jan.2, 2005 |
9 - A Priority for Italian Embassy
Alessandro Cortese promises to look into the future of language studies
By Antonio Maglio
Originally Published: 2003-03-09
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Alessandro Cortese
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The list of the problems that teachers of Italian Language and Culture working in Canada and the United States have to put up with every day is quite long.
First, the textbooks. Those available have been conceived and produced in Italy, and this stands out. Occasionally, for instance, one reads "our country" and Canadian students immediately think "Canada". The text, however, refers to Italy. Misunderstandings like these do not help students who are misled by them. The fact is that those books mirror Italy's cultural reality, not Canada's.
Two alternative solutions have been proposed: either financing Canadian scholastic publications in Italian, or establishing close collaborations between Italian and Canadian publishing companies for the production of textbooks reflecting the Canadian cultural reality.
Several institutions have requested a solid collaboration between Canadian and Italian universities; at present this is rather tenuous. In most cases, in fact, the collaboration is limited to personal relations among teachers and is mainly oriented to organizing congresses.
This is certainly useful to the professors, but has little to do with the students, who need assistance when they visit Italy. For instance, regardless of preparation, someone going to Italy for the first time to search archives has to cope with significant academic and bureaucratic difficulties. The three or four weeks would be much more useful if the student could access archives and libraries through the academic and administrative structures of Italian universities, and even more so if an Italian professor was available for an eventual consultation. The collaboration between Canadian and Italian universities would require cultural agreements and organizational structure as yet non-existing.
The problem of professional training for teachers of Italian worries all the Canadian and U.S. teachers we interviewed for this series. Also in this case, the solution lies in a closer collaboration between Italian and Canadian universities. From the operational standpoint, there are two possibilities: the first is to offer study programmes, or rather short-term internships, in Italian universities for teacher candidates who wish to graduate as teachers of Italian in Canadian or U.S. universities.
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