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Philosophy and Pedagogy
As language is the true essence of each culture, it is the best medium to learn, understand, and keep one’s own culture and it is the best vehicle to transmit it to future generations.
In Canada, the study of Italian language and culture has three principal objectives:
- To allow Italian-Canadians to retain, discover, or re-discover their linguistic-cultural heritage;
- To allow all people living in Canada to better appreciate the ways in which Italian culture has contributed enormously to the development of Western civilization; and
- To facilitate cultural, economic, and political relations between Canada and Italy.
The program is meant to offer students a didactic itinerary that will allow them to develop language skills to communicate in Italian, cultural awareness, and a positive approach to Italian language and to those who speak it.
The acquisition of a second language helps deepen one's knowledge of his/her mother tongue, facilitates the learning of other languages, and stimulates the mind; it reinforces academic skills and allows the invidual to avail him- or herself of improved economic opportunities in his/her own homeland and in the “global village.”
The Italian language, as other modern languages, is composed of about 50,000 words. The 1,000 most common words represent 85% of all usage, the following 2,000 cover 10%, and the remaining 47,000 words cover only 5%. (Katerin Katerinov-M.C. Borlosi “La Lingua Italiana per Stranieri")
Therefore, the lexical objective of the whole program is that students know and use sufficiently well at the least the 1,000 most common words.