La didattica dell'italiano a studenti cinesi e il progetto Marco Polo ...

Teaching Italian to Chinese students: The Marco Polo Project
English Abstract
The Marco Polo project is an agreement (established in 2006) between the Italian
government and the Chinese government. The agreement allows Chinese undergraduate
students to come to Italy to study Italian for six months before enrolling in Italian
Universities. After four years since the agreement has been signed, some of the Italian
Universities involved in the project met in Rome to share problems, idea and to set
affordable plans for the future.
The authors face issues such as teaching grammar, phonetics, prosody, lexicon and
Italian culture. All the contributes published in this volume stem from a common
perspective: teaching Italian to Chinese students is as challenging as rewarding from
both scientific and professional points of view because explicit instruction in language
courses is designed not only to allow students to interact with native speakers in
everyday life, but also to attend courses taught in Italian and to master the formal
registers of written and spoken language. The main complication arises from the
disparity between the duration of the project (6 months) and its goals. Language
acquisition is a long-lasting process and none can seriously maintain that six months are
enough for the task. While easy solutions still seem not to be at hand, more efforts are
necessary to ensure that Chinese students can continue to improve their developing
skills throughout and also after the Marco Polo project is over.
Elisabetta Bonvino is research fellow in Linguistics and Language Teaching at the
Department of Linguistics in the University of Roma Tre. Her main research interests
are: the intercomprehension among Romance languages, the teaching of the Italian
language as L2, the analysis of spoken language, and the evaluation of linguistics
competences.
Stefano Rastelli is research fellow in Linguistics and Language Teaching at the
University of Pavia, where he also serves as the Italian Language Program coordinator.