The best practice to use music in order to facilitate the foreign students’ learning of Italian as second language originated from the need to identify increasingly pressing new educational-didactic strategies, even in order to foster the inclusion of the high number of foreign students enrolled in the schools of our Country. Such students, in fact, have to learn Italian in order to carry out their educational path and social inclusion successfully.
I implemented this best practice - both as Music teacher and as graduate student in Ethno-anthropology at the University La Sapienza in Rome - in lower secondary school classes and in the Permanent Territorial Centers 11 and 21 of Rome, attended by unaccompanied minors and migrant women participating in schooling courses in Italian.
In order to teach Italian to foreign students through the musicality of words, I selected 47 oral tradition songs connected to important moments and activities in the life of every human being, at all latitudes: songs used to play, narrate, work, celebrate, dance and pray. I proposed such songs in classes to facilitate an intercultural exchange between migrant and Italian students as well as with Italian teachers, stimulating the memory of the musical experiences of those involved, their mutual sharing and transformation. The oral tradition repertoire turned out to be valuable to develop in students even music improvisation skills. In fact, as known, it is possible to use the pieces of this repertoire as models to be imitated and re-manipulated creatively.
In order to realize this best practice, it is necessary to have a good sound system, a good Internet connection, Orff instruments, a piano (if possible), and the recordings of oral tradition pieces that can be found at the links indicated under the section “download useful materials”.
The skills, goals and training objectives selected by the teacher for this experience are shown below.
The students learned how to:
- listen to an oral tradition song and reproduce it by imitating it with their voices, individually or in choir
- sing the song listened to - individually and/or in choir - memorizing it and paying attention to the articulation of the single phonemes of the words, respecting the accents and pauses of the lyrics
- accompany with rhythmic instruments the intonation of the song, performed individually and/or in choir
- propose to the class an oral traditional song from their own country of origin
- teach an oral tradition song from their own country of origin to classmates and teachers
- improvise their own song following the rhythmic/melodic models and composition techniques of oral tradition singers, that students make their own by imitation, even participating in collective formulation processes
| Presentazione della buona pratica | Download |
| Rorogwela (ninna nanna delle Isole Salomome) | Click here |
| Volume of Left Heschl's Gyrus and Linguistic Pitch Learning | Click here |
| Video con la documentazione della pratica descritta | Click here |
| PAOLO MANZELLI, Cervello e linguaggio. Sintetiche osservazioni e riflessioni, Educazione e scuola: | Click here |
| Abstract del Symposium su Music- Language Interactions in the Brain, 2010 | Click here |
| Canti di tradizione orale con i quali lavorare | Download |
| Cartellone della Storia di Iqbal | Download |
| [File audio] Conta bengalese intonata in classe da uno studente proveniente dal Bangladesh | Download |
| [File audio] Filastrocca per conta albanese intonata in classe da un’alunna proveniente dall’Albania | Download |
| Cartellone della Storia di Nonno Giovanni | Download |
| [File audio] Nia, nia, nia (Ninna nanna lucana) | Download |
| Trascrizione de Lu trenu di lu Suli | Download |
| Trascrizione filastrocca albanese | Download |
| Bibliografia | Download |
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