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Folklore and Language Teaching: Preliminary Remarks and Practical Suggestions

1992; American Association of Teachers of Italian; Volume: 69; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/479690

2325-6672

Sabina Magliocco,

Media, Communication, and Education

The ultimate goal of teaching language is to teach something about the culture in which that language is spoken. Yet especially at the elementary levels of instruction, it is easy to lose sight of this goal as students struggle with the most basic aspects of language. What is the difference between the imperfect and the past perfect; how are the impersonal pronouns used; does the rather sleepy-looking student in the back row even know what an impersonal pronoun is? In this climate, it is difficult to make the leap between grammar and culture, between teaching the imperfect and teaching the complexities of culture that has produced the literature, art, architecture and scholarship which we ultimately would like our students to appreciate. I have found that folklore is an ideal tool for bridging the gap between language and culture in the classroom. By using folk and popular materials to illustrate or expand on grammatical points, students' attention can be drawn to broader cultural issues, including values, worldview, history, and even literature.' The study of folklore and the study of language share a historical link in their early nineteenth-century emergence. The idea of a national language and culture, with roots in the indigenous folk culture of peasants, took form during the eighteenth century under the pens of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried von Herder.2 Influenced by Herder's Romanticism, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collected what would be later published as the Kinderund Hausmdrchen (1812). What is less well-known is that while Wilhelm had a poet's interest in the tales, Jakob worked more from an interest in German philology and comparative dialectology. Early folklorists such as Max Miller regarded aspects of folk narrative as a disease of language whose origins were to be found in philological inquiry. In the U.S. the great anthropologist Franz Boas collected myths from the Native Americans of the Northwest coast out of an original fascination with Native American languages. It was the language of the