LEARNING ITALIAN FOR CHINESE SPEAKER

http://article.yeeyan.org/view/159203/111721

http://www.tvprato.it/archives/16375 ( ITALIAN LESSON WITH VIDEO)

Ciascuna delle dieci puntate corrisponde ad una lezione nella quale sarà riprodotta una situazione ricorrente nella realtà quotidiana. Il filo conduttore è la storia di un ragazzo cinese che arriva a Prato dove viene accolto da una ragazza della stessa etnia che vive a Prato e parla italiano e lo aiuta a conoscere la città e la nostra lingua in modo progressivo con difficoltà via via crescenti. I due giovani si trovano ad affrontare situazioni molto verosimili: si comincia con le presentazioni e si prosegue simulando una conversazione tipo alla fermata dell’autobus, alla posta, a colloquio con un professore, all’ospedale, a cena, nelle uscite con gli amici o nel fare una telefonata, cercare casa, chiedere indicazioni stradali.
“Il nostro obiettivo non è soltanto di insegnare la lingua italiana così complessa ma piuttosto aiutare la comunità cinese a familiarizzare con una società assai diversa dalla loro e con situazioni che ogni giorno devono affrontare”.
Ogni puntata della trasmissione si concluderà con il confronto fra due proverbi, uno cinese e uno italiano: servirà a mettere in evidenza che le due culture sono certamente diverse ma con curiosi punti in comune.

example of intercultural communication lesson plan

Developing Awareness:
An Intercultural Communication Lesson Plan
Asako Kajiura

Lesson Objectives:
Increase student's ability to interact with and understand aspects of other cultures such as body language, discourse patterns, male and female roles. The students use English during the whole process.
Student Levels:
This activity is appropriate for intermediate and advanced level students. Teachers can vary the difficulty of the language and tasks involved to fit their classes.
Prior to this lesson:
It is necessary to have pretaught the concept of body language, especially regarding greetings, leave takings, personal space. Of course, students must know vocabulary such as bowing, shaking hands, hugging, kissing touching palms together, etc...

For teaching these, it is useful to use sections from videos which show people from many cultures greeting, eating, starting conversations etc.. Students watch with the task of observing and recording how Italian, Saudi Arabian and Thai males and females interact with each other.
The Lesson:
Divide your class in half. Tell the students that each group is a new culture and each culture must create its own body language for greetings, leave takings, etc.. They must also decide what questions are asked and what topics are discussed when meeting strangers. They must also decide if and in what ways men and women in their cultures differ communicatively. Less imaginative students may require some funny or strange examples to inspire their creativity.

Place the students in two different rooms, so the groups cannot look at or overhear each other. In each room, they create their body language and other rules of social interaction. Then students within each group practice with each other, following their rules.

In the next stage, explorers from each culture travel to the other culture with instructions to interact and observe the foreign group's body language, conversation rules, sex roles, etc.. During this stage each group has foreign guests. Give them three to five minutes to interact. Then the foreigners return to their home cultures and report their observations to their partners. After this, a new group of explorers leaves for the foreign culture and the process is repeated until all students have spent time exploring and observing the foreign culture. Each group discusses how the two cultures differ and what they share in common.

In the last step, all members of the two cultures come together in one class. Representatives from each culture express their assumptions about the other culture. Each group tells the other group if the assumptions are correct. If the assumptions are incorrect, the groups teach their rules of social interaction.

Bibliography
Asako Kajiura http://iteslj.org/Lessons/Kajiura-Intercultural.html

ABSTRACT OF PHD THESIS, Author: Edoardo Natale

This study describes an analysis of the speech act of disagreement, in a sociopragmatics perspective, with the aim of establishing the cultural differences between Italian-speaking and French-speakers. I choose the disagreement as a prominent feature because it allows to analyze the linguistic politeness inside of a corpus of Italian and French television interviews.
The research is composed of a first part focuses on the exploration of various methodological models useful for the investigation of the linguistic phenomenon of disagreement, while the second part of the thesis concerns the analysis of the disagreement reported in the elected corpus. The analysis, conducted in accordance with the principles of sociopragmatics of Spencer-Oatey and Jiang, using the model of linguistic politeness by Brown and Levinson, with the grafts of Kebrat-Orecchioni, within an approach with the work of etnopragmatics (Duranti), highlights some differences in the realization of French and Italian speakers disagreement between speakers. These differences are attributable, according to the perspective adopted in this research, a different ethos in the two communities of speakers.
The ethos of the French would allow construction of more severe or aggravated disagreement is used as the linguistic structures that are not perceived as detrimental to the positive face of the speaker, in contrast Italian speakers in the production of the disagreement is almost always a threat to face upward, especially for their skills and \ or psychological identity. These results seem to adhere to a notion of ethos based on consideration and non-consideration by the Italian speakers, in which the linguistic politeness move from respect or no-respect for the interpersonal relationship with the approval or denial of interpersonal reality of the speaker. Instead, the ethos of the French seem to want to show a tendency to candor and to "engagement" through the emotional involvement of the speaker during the verbal exchange showing a greater willingness in terms of interactional rights between speakers.

Intercultural Sensitivity Inventory ICSI

In sintonia con il pensiero di Richard Brislin ( 2011) si afferma che la sensibilità interculturale proviene dalla capacità delle persone di modificare il loro comportamento abitudinale ( acquisito all'interno della propria cultura) quando si trovano ad interagire in modo duraturo con persone provenienti da un altro retroterra culturale. Brislin (2011) cita l'esempio degli impiegati che riescono più facilmente ad essere nella posizione di essere in disaccordo con i loro superiori in un ambito pubblico quando si trovano all'interno di una cultura di tipo individualistica e con scarsa distanza sociale tra i detentori del potere e i vari subordinati. Gli impiegati faranno molta più fatica se dovranno produrre il loro disaccordo in un contesto culturale caratterizzato da un alto indice di distanza sociale tra dirigenti e subordinati. Questi comportamenti spingono alla comprensione dei nostri comportamenti usuali e a tentare di capire le ragioni di questi comportamenti vengono valutati come efficaci nella realizzazione dei propri obiettivi nella propria cultura. La possibilità di modificare il proprio comportamento durante l'interazione con altre culture deve essere in linea con l'idea che modificare il proprio comportamento permette di realizzare i nostri obiettivi in modo più appropriato.

Bibliografia:

Brislin, R. (2000). Understanding culture's influence on behavior, 2nd ed. Fort Worth, TX:
Harcourt.