RJA #2b: The Role of basic linguistics and grammar in the Italian learning progress--their effectivity in overall fluency

1. So, overall, although I think my topic will definitely become narrower over the course of the coming weeks, I want to research the approach of Italian linguistics and their role in the Italian curriculm in foreign language departments at various universities. What I want to argue is still a bit vague to me since I haven't read any of my sources, but I think I'm interested in discussing the difference of effectivity of learning Italian in an American university in the United States, learning Italian during a semester abroad at a university which teaches its classes in English and in which a student is surrounded by other English-speakers, and the complete immersion experience, where a student is placed in a smaller town where they are one of the few people who can speak English. I'm interested to see how the lack or abundance of learning the language--that is, the basic grammar--affects the overall learning and increase in fluency of the student over the course of time. This will be a subject of great interest to me, and I'm looking forward to being able to use my findings in my studies beyond this class.

2. Things I already know:

• In my previous research, I have found that a full-immersion experience is far more effective in the overall learning of the Italian language--that opposed to the learning of the foreign language through an American classroom and professors.
• I have first-hand experience of the above two types of learning the Italian language, and can say which I believe helped me more.
• I know I am greatly interested in the basic grammar of the language and how it affects the learning of a student of Italian.
• Because I greatly enjoy linguistics, I'm willing to break the language down into bits and pieces in order to achieve my goal of a great research paper.

3. Things I don't know and would like to know more about:

• Which approach of language learning is more effective.
• What the different approaches of language learning are, and how they have worked over the years.
• Which types of experiences American university students have had in the course of their Italian language study--(I am completely open to learning about the learning processes of other languages in order to further understand my specific love of Italian)--this is something I could learn more about by interviewing students as part of my field research.
• I'm also very interested to see what my Italian professor at Metro has to say--I'm very close with her and plan on interviewing her as a great asset to my paper--she is very knowledgeable and had many opinions to share with me after reading my first paper (which has been mentioned several times before).

In addition, I fully intend to somehow post my previous research paper, as someone or another might be interested in learning more about what I already know.

I'm very excited to learn, and am intrigued to see what I can find!