On the morning of May 23rd and 24th, Dr. Vincenzo Pinello, who came from the Italian School of Italians at the University of Palermo, Italy, was invited to present two lectures for our teachers and students from the Italian Department. They were the Characteristics of Italian in the Italian youth and How to Creatively Use Literary Texts.
In the first lecture, he took some movies as examples to point out that language was formed in some specific code and used in a certain circle. Italian youth slangs were used by the youth, which had the following sources: dialects, informal oral Italian, advertisements, mass media, and Italian that was influenced by foreign languages like English and Spanish.
Dr. Pinello emphasized Italian used in the youth was quite different from standard Italian due to the diversity of the above-mentioned sources. Therefore, only by combining Italian grammar and pragmatics could the foreign language learners have a good command of Italian.
In the second lecture, Dr. Pinello encouraged the students to replace some words in the poems and even rewrite them using synonyms to create new ones. He even prepared some word puzzles for the students to practice Italian.
Dr. Pinero introduced some lexical syntax in Italian in an interesting and easy-to-understand way. During the whole lecture, the students felt really relaxed but obtained a lot. Such kind of teaching also inspired our teachers to adjust their classroom teaching to meet the needs of our students.
