Films and Language Pedagogy: Neurocognitive Foundations and the Creation of a Teaching Unit using Clips from Paolo Virzi’s La prima cosa bella
In the last two decades, the field of language pedagogy has shown an indisputable success in adopting new multimedia technologies and in utilizing audiovisual material. The lion share of these new approaches consists in utilizing movie clips through which students can experience linguistic, sociolinguistic, cultural and intercultural contents. In a movie, language patterns are inserted in a narrative context that renders the learning process for students fuller and more entertaining: in fact, not only do students encounter “authentic” linguistic structures, but also have the chance to familiarize with various intonations and accents, nonverbal interjections, representations of everyday Italian life that artificial textbook dialogues can hardly present. Films are a potentially limitless source of inputs through which students can acquire, strengthen, and consolidate their ability to understand and produce in Italian, as well as learn an array of paralinguistic, sociolinguistic and extra-linguistic features that accompany verbal interactions in a different sociocultural context.
With the development of research on cognitive processes, it has been determined that we learn mostly through the eyes. As Paolo Balboni put it: “83% of the information that the brain processes come through the eyes; only 11% through the ear”. Direct observation of human interactions on a screen – how people talk to each other, their bodily gestures, how they dress, how they react in precise contexts, etc. – is by far the best tool at our disposal for the teaching and learning of foreign languages and cultures.
This paper offers examples of teaching strategies to consolidate the language learning and to increase the cultural and intercultural competence. After a general introduction on the importance of audiovisual materials in the classroom, this presentation explains how to create language lessons around a selection of very short movie clips. Through Paolo Virzì’s recent film La prima cosa bella (The First Beautiful Thing), I want to demonstrate how movies represent an excellent didactic instrument for the development and experimentation with Italian. Parts of this paper will be published in “Quaderni del Cinema Italiano” Edizioni Guerra.
Elisa Dossena Marcon is an Italian Language Lecturer at Princeton University. Her research interest lies in the area of new multimedia technologies applied to teaching. She is especially interested in the use of audiovisual materials in teaching foreign languages. She is the coauthor of a book in the series “Quaderni del cinema italiano” on La prima cosa bella by Paolo Virzì. She holds a first level Master in Teaching Italian as a Foreign Language from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari in Italy and is currently writing her thesis for the Second Level Master in Advance Planning and Organization of Italian Language Courses for Foreigners at the same university.
Elisa Dossena Marcon attained a “laurea” degree in Oriental Languages and Literatures from the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and subsequently taught Italian language and culture for five years at the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, Japan. She taught and directed Italian language programs in several language schools in the USA and Japan.