Meeting Foreignness: Foreign Languages and Foreign Language Education as Critical and Intercultural Experiences by Paola Giorgis
Though with a global perspective, the book also addresses the Italian context in particular: after introducing a brief historical background, it examines how 'foreignness' is addressed, portrayed, or questioned in contemporary socio-cultural and political debates, and presents practical activities to show how the foreign language can be used for intercultural purposes.
An original interdisciplinary approach, combining Critical Linguistics, Foreign Language Education, Intercultural Studies, and Critical Pedagogies, together with works of literature and examples from several fields, integrates theoretical references, practices and research methodologies to take the reader within the complex and fascinating world of languages, displaying how they inform individual and collective identities and representations, and how they can both serve processes of manipulation and domination, as well as those of empowerment and emancipation. For its interdisciplinary and integrated approach, this book aims to address teachers, educators, scholars, practitioners, researchers, and students, but also those readers who are curious to know more about languages, and about how they shape our identities, our meanings and our lives.