The Grammar of Italian L1 as a Cognitive Lifeline for ‘Liquid’ Students
Abstract
Edgar Morin and Zygmunt Baumann: two great sociologists who described modernity respectively as ‘complexity’, in the late twentieth century, and as ‘liquidity’ in our century – and linguistic education in a complex society is different from that in a ‘liquid’ society, with ‘liquid’ students using ‘liquid’ hypersimplified communication. Starting from this opposition, the essay studies the teaching of Italian L1, focusing on the teaching of grammar (in a broad sense) through inductive, active processes. The aim is to make adolescents discover that complexity exists and that it can be known and managed: an idea of linguistic education that, precisely because it operates on something already possessed, Italian, does not pose significant problems of content to be learned, allowing students to focus their attention on the procedures of discovery, analysis and synthesis – in other words, linguistic education that has communicative purposes but above all cognitive purposes, not scholae sed vitae.
Submitted: July 10, 2025 | Published Aug. 29, 2025 | Language: it
Keywords Italian as the mother tongue • Teaching the mother tongue • Educational Linguistics • Teaching Italian • Teaching grammar
Copyright © 2025 Paolo E. Balboni. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/ELLE/2280-6792/2025/02/000