Article Summary

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  The article “Teaching about the Other Italian Languages: Dialectology in the Italian Curriculum” written by professor Lori Repetti is devote to the discussion of the problem of teaching dialectology during the education of future Italian language teachers in Cambridge University. First, the author draws our attention to the comments of her colleagues during the recent conference of Italianists. She emphasizes that their comments are inaccurate because those people are incompetent in Italian dialects and do not understand the difference between a language and a dialect. Than the author writes about the reasons for teaching the course of dialectology. She says that Italy is and always has been a multicultural and multilingual country, and due to this fact it is very important and very helpful to speak about its varieties while teaching standard Italian. Lori Repetti also emphasizes that future teachers of Italian should inform their students that the dialects are not corrupted forms of standard Italian, but are its sister languages. She adds that the knowledge of nonstandard language will help future teachers to teach the standard one better. Further, the author demonstrates the structure of the dialectology course. She draws our attention that the goal of this course in not to teach the students speak the dialects, but to make them familiar with the linguistic situation in Italy. Lori Repetti concludes saying that the dialectology courses which she has taught have always been very successful and attracted many students. 

  
  

  I have chosen this article first of all because I love Italian language. This is a well-known fact that it has a number of different dialects, and I find this topic quite interesting. It was very useful for me to know some new information about the dialects and the linguistic situation of Italy.

  
  

  Questions:

  
  

  1. To which aspects of the dialectology course special attention should be paid? 

  2. How long the course is considered to be?

  3. In which aspects of the course the students usually are most interested?