The media and their impact on the acquisition of Italian in Malta

Abstract

In Malta many people are regularly exposed to the Italian language via the media and this seems to be enough to justify the fact that it is taken for granted that in Malta Italian is understood well. This is also reflected by the declining figures of students in local Junior Lyceums who study Italian from Form 1. In fact many students in these schools start studying Italian, if they ever study the language, in Form 3 rather than in Form 1. Some students even sit for the SEC examination of Italian without ever having studied the subject at school. Some of these students sit for this examination after attending private lessons or evening classes for a few months, whereas others sit for the examination relying exclusively on the competence that they may have obtained after watching Italian television programmes for many years and after being exposed to the language through other means of communication. At times it is the Junior Lyceum students themselves who opt freely not to study Italian formally at an early stage of their Secondary schooling. In other cases it seems that parents exercise their influence on their children by encouraging them to study French or German in Form 1 and eventually to opt for Italian in Form 3- "it-Taljan tagln!ux minn Form 1, dak taqbdu mit-televixin! ("do not choose Italian at Form l level, you'll pick it up from television!") and other similar statements are frequently heard and though they rarely seem to be based on any theoretical insight or on any knowledge regarding language teaching and learning, they cannot go unnoticed. These and other such considerations were the triggers which in the early 90s motivated a group ofB.Ed.(Hons) students, amongst whom myself, to start exploring the issues regarding the language of the Italian media, that is the linguistic input that Maltese students receive from the media. It was evident then, as it is now, that the presence of the Italian media had breathed new life into a language, the active use of which in Malta had declined during the first decades of this century. Consequently, it is highly relevant to investigate the extent and the impact of this linguistic input on the individuals who are exposed to it.