Staff Interview with Gianni Balbini

What led you to joining the team at Scuola di Italiano Dante Alighieri?

After my elder position as a member of market and communication office of an home appliances factory ended, I realized had always dreamed to work as a teacher. 

I studied at the “Università per Stranieri di Perugia” and took a DILS (Didattica dell’Italiano Lingua Seconda) certification and I started to teach at Scuola Dante Alighieri, thinking I’d work there just the time I needed to find another job. But teaching was too captivating to leave the position, so I have continued to teach until now.

Can you tell us about your experiences teaching Italian with Scuola di Italiano Dante Alighieri?

It is a great experience, but it does not permit to earn a lot. I meet new students coming from all over the world every month, and every day I am involved in a new challenge. I like to teach, and I like that students discover the Italian culture, both during the language lessons and the culture lessons. Moreover, we lead students to visit different cities and towns in the whole nation. I like teaching Italian to foreign people because most of the students are really committed to learn.

What is your favorite part of your job?

The better part of the job is sharing experiences with other people. I think I learn more than I teach. Anyway, in a more strict meaning of the question, I like the karaoke and games, the tours in the cities looking for art, the gastronomy, and everything that involves a strong interaction between students.

What challenges do people often face when learning Italian, and how do you help them overcome them?

I believe there are two main challenges.

The first: educating on the listening skill. In fact people are used to thinking an idiom as written words, with the duty to know the meanings. But a language is made of sounds and to listen, recognize, and reproduce them is the only way to learn it. When we were children and we need water, we didn’t need to understand the meaning, but to produce the sound “water”. Most of the time, students forget the sounds and are focused on the meaning. I am building more and more of  my lessons around the listening and phonetic training through real everyday talking, songs, movies, tours.

In addition, I not only ask them to reproduce a word, but I teach my students the exact movements of the mouth and the tongue to create the sound we need. For example, Anglophone people are used to moving their tongue while producing a vowel, but this should be avoided in Italian language.

The second: communication. An idiom is a tool to communicate. I try to create a climate of continuous friendly informal communication between the students. In my humble opinion, students that are working together and feel as though they are in the same position, learn better as it becomes easier for them to absorb the language.

What advice would you share with people pursuing another language?

Start listening, without even understanding, and reproduce the sounds. And, moreover, never fear making mistakes: “sbagliando s’impara” (we learn through mistake) is my motto.

How does your degree in Philosophy influence the work you do today?

As some philosophies say, learning is not to let something enter into our brain, but it is creating the thing we are learning again. We always learn something new, even if it is really ancient. This is even truer, if possible, for idioms: we create the language again, when we learn it. I think this always drives my approach in teaching, so I don’t think there are mistakes, just tries.

Can you tell us about the gastronomy course you organize?

The course is divided in two weeks of Italian language, plus two weeks of a gastronomy course. The gastronomy course is practical: we teach how to cook pizza, pasta, risotto, traditional meat dishes, traditional desserts, and traditional seafood, and we teach how to taste cheese, wine, spirits, and chocolate.

We also make student try a real aperitivo, or a real espresso or cappuccino, putting students in the same context as Italians do and teaching them to do it in the Italian way. Students go to wineries, pizzerias, and restaurants to see them for real. We even walk in vineyards, and olive fields.

In my opinion, we often give foreign people an easy and watered down gastronomy lesson for marketing reasons. I do prefer to go straight to the real matter, never mind if it hurts the “Tuscany dream” we are used to selling. Obviously I provide short history and theory about what we do, as a little course of sensory analysis.

Why do you think it is important for people to learn new languages?

We can say, as a metaphor, that a language is not just a tool to communicate, but also our “operating system”. And, moreover, every language is deeply linked to its own special culture. So learning a new language, as with traveling, is one of the best way to expand our horizons.

What does meaningful travel mean to you?

It is trying to understand the reason for which some people do something in a different way than we are used to. This means immersing yourself in the culture of the country you are traveling in, by learning a little of its idiom, by copying its behaviors, by eating its food and drinking their beverages. And also by enjoying its music, art, dance and so on… At the end of the travel we should have lost a little of us and gained a little of the others. 

What hopes do you have for the future with Scuola di Italiano Dante Alighieri?

Since I have been involved with this school, I have had to become more flexible, to change the ways I was used to do things and start new ways. This is the worst and best part of my job, but it has made me change and maybe even improve. So I hope to continue to change and discover even more ways to travel. I would like to create special texts to teach phonetics, a course on fashion, a new lesson of Italian pop music, and enhance the things that I already do. Also, I hope to empower a long lasting teaching education for students who want it, using the internet