Dear Loredana Polezzi,
I sincerely hope you get lots of feedback, as a scientific study of
this problems needs to be done.
In the past we, at at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg, always taught literature etc. in the target language,
with the sole exception of in the first semester of our first year
courses for ab initio students. With most students who went on to
major in Italian we achieved satisfactory results and we were sure
the method worked well. In more recent years we are not getting the
same calibre of students and we find we have had to do more and more
teaching in English and even allow a number of assignments (term
papers) to be written in English. The conseptual content of such
papers shows a marked improvement in some (not all) cases, but the
students' general overall ability to write literary Italian has
decreased considerably (perhaps also because they now rely more on
critical material written in English).
I would be very interested to read the results of your survey and
your paper when it is published, as at this stage the question is
still hotly debated amongst ourselves.
Alida Poeti
(Dept. of Modern Languages and Literatures)
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