Political science and international relations

ELENA BELLAVIA
ELENA BELLAVIA

"German between Language, Culture and Society" is the title of this course (9 CFU), the objectives of which have a dual character:

(i) The educational objective of the monographic course is to promote the competence and sensitivity useful for adequately addressing the encounter with the German language and culture. Through the semantic analysis of culturally connoted or politically used words, we will study those values and codes that represent potential factors of misunderstanding between Italians and Germans. The work on the ability to mediate cultural aspects of the German-speaking world will go hand in hand with the lexical and grammatical expansion, obtained by developing the ability to read, understand and interpret texts.

(ii) The objective of the lectorship course (held by the linguistic expert and instructor Dott.ssa Antje Ingeborg Wolf), aims at the acquisition of language skills related to A2/B1 of the CEFR.

Attendance to both courses (monographic & lettorato) is strongly recommended. Non-attending students are required to agree on the study program with their respective teachers.

Being able to understand texts of the level addressed in the course, analysing them grammatically and culturally.

No prerequisites are required.

(i) Monographic course: The course involves the acquisition of the skills necessary for reading and interpreting texts in German, whose common thread is the encounter between different cultures: each text will focus on a dimension of values, in the comparison between German and Italian cultural models. A particular sensitivity will be had for the study of culturally connoted words. Students will have the opportunity to see that words are not simple "labels", but radial categories - placed in a complex network of associations with the most diverse connotations (social, political, cultural). The semantic analysis will then constitute the heuristic tool to reflect on values and codes typical of different cultures.

(ii) For the detailed program of language exercises (lectorship course), see CEL lecturer page (Dott. Wolf, Antje Ingeborg).

(i) Monographic course: study materials will be provided in the form of handouts by the course lecturer during the course. Some of the main bibliographical references (only short sections of which will be studied) are listed below:

1) Claudio DI MEOLA (2014), La linguistica tedesca. Roma: Bulzoni
2) BROGELLI HAFER, D./C. GENGAROLI-BAUER (2011), Italiani e tedeschi. Roma: Carocci
3) Ida CASTIGLIONI (2012), La comunicazione interculturale: competenze e pratiche. Roma: Carocci
4) Marisa FENOGLIO (1997), Vivere altrove. Palermo: Sellerio

Reference dictionaries:
- Monolingue: (2017 o ed. successive), PONS. Kompaktwörterbuch. Deutsch als Fremdsprache.
- Bilingue: Giacoma L./S. Kolb (2009 o ed. successive), Il Nuovo Dizionario di Tedesco. Dizionario Tedesco-Italiano, Italiano-Tedesco. Bologna: Zanichelli.

The course is divided into two parallel modules: the monographic course and the language exercises. In both cases, different approaches are envisaged: frontal lesson, work in pairs, mini-groups, plenum. The languages used in both modules are German for didactic interaction and exercises; Italian for theoretical illustrations.

Going assignments are planned for attending students, which will count towards the monographic course. Attendance is strongly recommended.

The final exam consists of:

(i) written test (2 hours) to evaluate the acquisition of the linguistic aspects studied during the lectorship course;
(ii) oral test - this part can be done after having passed (i). This test is divided into two parts: (a) an interview on the topics covered during the monographic course; (b) an interview in German aimed at testing the student's oral comprehension and production skills.

On the strictly linguistic side, the questions and exercises focus on text comprehension and the grammatical and lexical aspects covered in the course. In the written test, you are asked, for example, to complete a sentence with the correct preposition, declination, conjunction or personal pronoun. In the oral examination, you read a text from among those studied in the course, analysing it on a morphological and syntactic level (e.g. by analysing compound words and the constituents of the period), while on a semantic level, the denotative meaning and cultural connotations of individual words are asked.
In the part relating to the monographic course, in which the reading of the novel "Vivere altrove" is envisaged, we are asked to recognise ethnocentric and ethnorelative phases in the lives of the characters.