LInguistica per insegnare. Mente, lingue e apprendimento

The learning and development of the linguistic-communicative and metalinguistic abilities imply constants connected to the faculty of language and cognitive capabilities, and the paths of acquisition differentiate, also in a clear way, according to the individual characteristics and social factors. Linguistic learning involves, indeed, the delicate and crucial aspects of the linguistic and cultural identity of speakers, within a by now multilingual society and in a multicultural reality, where the language has a role determining in teaching the memberships and in modelling the symbolic universe of persons. Linguistica per insegnare presents the linguistic education not as a discipline but as a process that interacts in depth with language, understood as a human fact extraordinarily complex. Linguistic learning requires an approach attentive to the nature of language, a rich and articulated approach, distant from the traditional didactic practice generally consisting in lists of rules, models, methods and nomenclatures, disregarding the fact that in the classroom there are not ‘ideal’ speakers but ‘real’ speakers. Teaching (adequately) languages is possible if one chooses an approach including research and critical analysis, in which the data, although important, preserve a tentative and instrumental nature.