Italian Language and Literature Commons^™

Domesticity And Religion: Women In Italian American Literature And Culture Of The 1930s, Madeleine J. Kirkpatrick

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

The lives of Italian American women of the early twentieth century have been documented in fragments in histories of immigration and in the literature written by the children of first-wave immigrants. This documentation often leaves an incomplete picture of how Italian women lived and moved in their new American context in the first decades of the twentieth century. This thesis examines Pietro Di Donato’s portrayal of Annunziata in his 1939 novel Christ in Concretealongside the journals of Elba F. Gurzau, a real-life, second-generation Italian woman living in New York City during the 1930s. By holding these women up next to …

The Languages Of Italy: An Examination Of The Vitality Of Standard Italian And Dialects In Contemporary Italy, And The Role Of Dialect Speakers In The United States, Juliana Maria Esoldi

Senior Theses

In this thesis paper, I address the question of linguistic shift in the context of Southern Italian dialectology. I break this study up into two parts. First, I discuss the decline in usage of regional dialects in contemporary Southern Italy, particularly the regions of Calabria, Campania, and Sicily, and provide an assessment of their current vitalities and popularities. Then, I address the role of Italian dialect speakers abroad, specifically in the Italian American context, in this dynamic of linguistic evolution, extinction, and survival. Along with factual data and statistics describing the vitalities of the dialects in Italy, a selection of …

Ital 223 Advanced Conversation In Italian, Nicola Lucchi

Open Educational Resources

This course is designed to immerse students into the practice of Italian conversation and into the world of verbal performance. We will familiarize with the vocabulary, expressions and registers that Italians use to express themselves on radio and television, in newspapers, cafés, universities, offices, and on the streets. We will discuss cinema and music, politics and sports; we will learn how to navigate job interviews and interactions with strangers, both friendly and hostile. All the while, we will review and expand our vocabulary and grammatical competencies.

Classroom activities include debates, skits, role-play scenarios, task-based scenarios, as well as more traditional …

"Sometimes The Perspective Changes": Reflections On A Photography Workshop With Multicultural Students In Italy, Robin L. Danzak

Communication Disorders Faculty Publications

This article describes and evaluates an 8-week photography workshop, FotoLab, conducted in Italy at an afterschool-tutoring program for students acquiring Italian as an additional language. Seventeen students, age 8-17 and originating from 9 countries, participated. Co-facilitated by three international educator-researchers, FotoLab's purpose was to promote self-expression, collaboration, and visual literacy. Through a qualitative inquiry of the FotoLab curriculum, photographs and videos, field notes, and student questionnaires, this article reflects on themes of multiculturalism and multilingualism, collaboration, and visual literacy within a sociocultural animation framework. While expressions of cultural and linguistic identity emerged, findings emphasize the challenges and benefits of teamwork …

Quaestio Linguae 1995: The Use Of English Words In The Italian Language, Aaron Hess Sherinian

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Scholars have labored for centuries to define the elements that constitute the Italian language. This debate, the “QUAESTIO LINGUAE” or “question of the language” as it is referred to, often takes into consideration the influence of foreign languages upon Italian (Petronio 1987).

The Partisan And His Doppelganger: The Case Of Primo Levi, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

Published in 1982, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?) is Primo Levi's first novel proper. Perhaps Primo Levi is regretted not fully living life as an Italian Jewish partisan that he re-created his lost dream through its pages, and had his partisan brigade not been captured, perhaps Levi's underground fighting might have continued until the end of the war. If Not Now, When? thus might reflect Levi's need to explore that sought-after life as a partisan, which he had been denied after only three months of activity. Did Live write If Not Now, When? as a …

Presenting Italian Comparative And Superlative Forms Of Adjectives To College L2 Beginners, Ilona Klein

Faculty Publications

This study treats the necessity to de-emphasize the focus on grammar teaching alone in L2, and to introduce methods which are not teacher-centered, so as to enable students to interact more among each other.

By using comparative and superlative forms of adjectives – but in reality using a sequence of teaching techniques that could be applied to other grammatical situations – this article presents the use of sea shells as a visual and tactile aid which allows students to shift their L2 efforts from an abstract notion to a concrete usage.

This study offers a tool to attempt a balance …