Italian Abroad Research Articles

Challenges and opportunities for teaching Italian as a second language: A case study at the University of Toronto Mississauga

This article analyses the current condition of teaching Italian abroad and the ways in which second-language programmes can engage learners and meet their educational goals. While we are aware of the need for systematic action amongst various actors to ensure the future of Italian-language teaching, we choose to focus on the concept of Experiential Learning (EL). EL is a didactic action (i.e. a linguistic policy) which can be directly implemented into university courses or programmes and represents an innovative method of teaching Italian as a second language. Research on the theme of EL was conducted on Italian L2 courses at the University of Toronto Mississauga and involved instructors and students from various departments. These results lay the foundation for the creation of concrete educational policies, consistent with international literature on the action-oriented approach (CEFR, ACTFL), and for the ‘power of feasibility’ of individual classes (and individual teachers) of L2.

Work and Gender in the Context of Spatial Mobility and Migration: the Case of Highly Skilled Italians Abroad

Young, skilled and educated Italians have been emigrating in record numbers: About 160,000 Italians moved abroad in 2018 alone. While much of recent research focused on the economic drivers of this spatial mobility, this article explores highly skilled Italians’ mobile life projects from a gender perspective. Our study was guided by the following research questions: How do mobility and migration intersect with gender relations and career success in the lives of highly skilled Italians living abroad? What role does gender play in highly skilled Italians’ decisions about moving and staying abroad? Our research, which drew on semistructured in-depth interviews conducted with 51 university graduates, was part of a larger study of the determinants and trends in the new migration of the highly skilled from Tuscany, a region in Italy. Using Strauss and Corbin’s three-stage coding process to analyze the interviews, we identified four core themes of particular concern to participants when comparing Italy with the contexts they encountered abroad: gender-sensitive culture in the workplace, strategic and dialogic mobile life projects, impact of state and workplace policies and (subjective) age vis-à-vis temporariness. Our results both confirmed the findings of previous studies and prompted new questions in need of further investigation, such as experiences of gender (in)equality and their power to transform short-term mobility into mobile life projects or permanent migration, dual-career couples’ spatial mobility, and the impact of mobility on normative beliefs about key life events.

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Disrupted and Unsettled: An Introduction to Monuments, Memorials, and Italian Migrations

Order and otherness in a photographic shot: Italians abroad and the Great War

This article explores the meaning of photographic portraits of First World War Italian migrants, in terms of the tensions that emerge from their visual codes and the extent to which the subject’s interior reality and individuality might emerge from the reassuring surface imagery of photography and war. By analysing photographs of Italian migrants who either joined Italy’s army or enrolled in their adopted country’s army, we can see how the ‘otherness’ of the war – its artificial face of idealised glory, honour, and ordinariness, as presented through the portrait’s aesthetic codes – supplants the ‘otherness’ of the migrant individual, that is, their ambivalent life in between different cultures, traditions and identities. Yet, beyond the physical and psychological annihilation of the modern war, the photographic portrait, with its fabricated order and ‘otherness’, becomes, for the migrant soldier, a means of giving coherence to his dislocated existence. The nostalgic visual codes of the photograph, however, evoke an order that is now denied by the destructive mobility and mobilisation of both migration and war.

International Tourism in Italy (1997-2012)

The Bank of Italy conducts a sample survey on international tourism at the country’s main border crossings for balance-of-payments and analysis purposes. Each year a sample of international travellers (both foreigners in Italy and Italians abroad) who have crossed Italy’s borders is interviewed; counting operations are carried out in order to determine the size of the reference population. Between 1997 and 2012 international tourism produced a surplus in Italy’s balance of payments. Nonetheless, the tourism balance fell from 1.1 to 0.6 percent of GDP, mainly due to the fall in real terms of foreigners’ expenditure in Italy, whereas expenditure by Italians abroad remained practically unchanged as a share of GDP. As a result, the market share of Italian receipts decreased from 6.8 percent in 1997 to 3.7 percent in 2012. During the first years of the recent crisis, Italian international tourism receipts fell at a slower pace than those of its two main European competitors, France and Spain; but in 2011-12 their recovery was faster.

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Two Ways of Being Italian on Global Television

Sending States' Transnational Interventions in Politics, Culture, and Economics: The Historical Example of Italy

This article uses archival evidence to study in depth the historical policies of Italy as a classic sending state. Most of the mass migrations of a century ago came from multinational empires, but Italy was a recently formed independent state. Ambitious to benefit from emigration while assisting and protecting emigrants, Italy reached out to “Italians abroad” in several ways. For example, the state opened a low-cost channel for remittances through a nonprofit bank; promoted Italian language education among Italian families abroad; supported Italian Chambers of Commerce abroad; and subsidized religious missionary work among emigrants. Italy's historical example of political innovation and diplomatic negotiation provides context, comparisons, and possibilities for rapidly changing sending-state policies in the twenty-first century.

Code-switching and Italian abroad. Reflections on language contact and bilingual mixture

Code-switching and Italian abroad. Reflections on language contact and bilingual mixture

The Politics of "Italians Abroad": Nation, Diaspora, and New Geographies of Identity

The Politics of "Italians Abroad": Nation, Diaspora, and New Geographies of Identity

The Politics of “Italians Abroad”: Nation, Diaspora, and New Geographies of Identity

Italian people's relationship to national identity is complicated by a history of mass emigration that reached important proportions in the years following Italian Unification. There are approximately 4.5 million Italian emigrants living outside Italy, and an estimated 25 million emigrated between 1876 and 1965 (Vasta). When descendants of emigrants are included in the surveys, estimates reach up to 65 million people of “Italian origin” living around the world.

A Linguistic History of Italian

Part 1 Introduction: perspectives and aims the emergence of Italian chronology and historical sources a note on phonetic transcription some concepts in linguistic change. Part 2 History of the sound system: the prosodic system vowels consonants major vowel changes the glides [j] and [w], and their effects palatalizing effects of the front vowels consonantal weakening consonant lengthening, and syllable structure syllable-final weakening the word-final consonants dissimilation and metathesis the phonetic sources of inflectional -e and -i a note on learned phonology. Part 3 Structural evolution of nouns, adjectives and verbs: structure of words infectional morphology of the noun and adjective invariance and inflectionalessness number in the noun and adjective gender adjectives the demonstratives the articles the verb the pronouns the prepositions derivational word formation. Part 4 History of sentence structure: verb - subject agreement interrogation negation conjunctions comparison verb complementation aspect and tense mood. Part 5 Variation in modern Italian: types of variation the dialects structural influences of the dialects on popular Italian emergence of neostandard Italian? Italian abroad.

Recent Immigration Politics in Italy: A Short Story

The short history of recent Italian immigration politics spans four phases: (1) until 1986, an incoherent policy with little control over flows; (2) increased mobilisation of public opinion, followed by the extension of foreign workers’ rights and a flawed amnesty campaign; (3) renewed mobilisation of public opinion in 1989, and Italy's alignment with the Schengen group; (4) lower political salience since the events at Bari in 1991. The mobilisation of public opinion drives cycles of immigration policy‐making activity, but legislative procedures structure influence within policy networks and thus indirectly condition policy content. The weakness of xenophobia, the dismantling of the Ministry for Italians Abroad and Immigration, and preoccupation with the crisis of Italy's postwar system have made immigration an unimportant political issue since 1991.

Camilla Bettoni (ed.), Altro polo – Italian abroad: Studies on language contact in English-speaking countries. Sydney: University of Sydney, Frederick May Foundation for Italian Studies, 1986. Pp. vi + 220.

Camilla Bettoni (ed.), Altro polo – Italian abroad: Studies on language contact in English-speaking countries. Sydney: University of Sydney, Frederick May Foundation for Italian Studies, 1986. Pp. vi + 220. - Volume 18 Issue 3

Altro Polo: Italian Abroad: Studies on Language Contact in English-Speaking Countries

Altro Polo: Italian Abroad: Studies on Language Contact in English-Speaking Countries

Altro Polo: Italian Abroad: Studies on Language Contact in English-Speaking Countries

Altro Polo: Italian Abroad: Studies on Language Contact in English-Speaking Countries

İTALYA DIŞINDAKİ İTALYANCA ÖĞRETMENLERİ İÇİN DÜZENLENEN BİLGİ TAZELEME, GÜNCELLEŞTİRME KURSLARI

This article explains refresher courses which are organized every year for teachers of Italian abroad, and which aim to give teachers the opportunity to broaden their knowledge of the language as well as culture, and to enable them to have a better understanding of culture by introducing social facts in Italy.

Italians Abroad

Italians Abroad