Transnational Italian in Higher Education
The project TRANSIT (Transnational Italian in higher education) has the objective of supporting, developing, enhancing high educational programs and research in the field of Italian studies and teaching focusing on two different and complementary socio-cultural environments: (a) South America: areas in which Italian is present in the repertoire of the multicultural communities, especially Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia; (b) The Far East: areas in which interest towards Italian language and culture has been growing in recent decades, i.e. China, South Korea, and Vietnam.
The objectives the project intends to achieve are the following: 1. Enhancing scientific collaboration between Italian and international scholars in the domain of educational linguistics (e.g. teaching of Italian language and culture to foreigners, standard Italian and sociolinguistic variations) and sociolinguistics (contact between Italian and indigenous languages, “local” varieties of Italian and their relation to standard Italian). The aim is to develop new research perspectives in Italian studies. 2. Supporting and developing Bachelor, Master and PhD students’ mobility from foreign partner institutions to Italy and vice versa, aiming: (1) for foreign students: improving their language skills and their knowledge of Italian culture, and allowing them to reinforce their relational network with Italian people; (2) for Italian students: experiencing strategies for learning and teaching Italian abroad, improving their knowledge of foreign languages which are in contact with Italian in the different countries. The project also intends to reinforce and promote double-degree agreements, mutual-learning projects, esp. with South-America countries, which implies covering all mobility costs, as otherwise students cannot access mobility programmes. 3. Supporting and developing scholars’ mobility from Italy to foreign partner institutions for training Italian teachers abroad and collaborating with them. Italian teachers/instructors abroad usually do not receive any specific or enough teacher training and therefore their teaching methodology is outdated. 4. Supporting and developing Italian teachers’ mobility from foreign partner institutions to Italy to attend specific language teaching training in an Italianspeaking environment.