La Basilicata esiste! Percorso interculturale di osservazione e analisi della realtà contemporanea dei lucani nel film “Basilicata coast to coast”

Abstract

he study of a foreign language-culture in monolingual groups leads students to share their beliefs constructed in discursive imaginary, often based on superficial or stereotyped knowledge, in particular, because of the absence of specific material that can serve as support for the investi-gation of cultural data. The knowledge about the world shared by students can be used as a starting point in building a picture of the “other” culture of the country of the language studied in courses based on the development of communicative competence, as suggested by the Common European Fra-mework of Reference for Languages (CEFR, 2001). It would therefore be desirable that students of foreign language courses develop activities that help to build skills that take into account students’ personal characteristics, such as motivation, values, prior knowledge and cognitive styles. Learning to communicate, regardless of differences in cultural behaviors match, and do activities that develop a critical view of comparison between cultures means that they can take ownership of a fundamental background for a reflection on the differences of the points of contact between the own culture, in this case the Brazilian, and that of the “other”, here the Italian. The choice of the film language, which is iconic, discursive and figurative at the same time, allows a variety of starting points, including activities to be developed in the classroom. Thanks to the use of films of recent production it is possible to de-velop communicative activities with an intercultural approach, as in the case presented in this paper, that starts from the analysis of a film about the Italian region of Basilicata. The proposed activities give the possibility to work on interdisciplinarity, as suggested by the CEFR and penetrate on issues such as the crisis of modern society, the role of women in contemporary Southern Italy, the music as a vehicle of thought in the society and, of course, the geo-graphy of Italy, with its peculiar social characteristics of southern Italy.