The Ties that Bind: Italian for Spanish Speakers in Intercomprehension
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Workshop on “Intercomprehension” and Multilingualism: Teaching Italian to Romance Languages speakers
Italian Language Resouce Laboratory, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College – CUNY
Saturday, 14 September 2013
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American high school and college students are increasingly multilingual and transnational, with experiences of language and culture that no longer match current language acquisition pedagogies. This paper will present the affective, demographic, and perceptive underpinnings of California State University, Long Beach's Italian for Spanish Speakers program. It will discuss how Intercomprehension has been adapted to transform the Italian language acquisition classroom for speakers of Spanish to build upon their “bilingual advantage” to accelerate and enhance the acquisition of a third, fourth, or multiple languages at the same time. A discussion of survey data from these courses will elucidate student perceptions of the program.