„Contagiare le persone tramite la potenza delle note e delle parole”

Zum Potential von Musikvideos für die Auseinandersetzung mit Nachhaltigkeit im Italienischunterricht

Abstract

Cross-sectional school tasks such as raising awareness of sustainability are not always easy to treat in foreign language lessons. If these topics have already been dealt with in several other subjects, and this should be the case with cross-sectional topics, they are at risk to induce a kind of boredom in learning groups. The challenge of communicating in the foreign language also makes some curricular objectives unrealistic. This is especially true when it comes to a subject such as Italian, which is typically taught late in the school career. How should pupils be enabled to talk about complex environmental topics if they are actually at level A of the CEFR? And how should one deal with sustainability as a discursive construction, with different conceptualizations of nature and its destruction as well as with environmental narratives if language skills are limited? A possible solution are multimodal texts. They can facilitate reception by combining multiple channels of perception. At the same time, image and sound are part of the story that needs to be decoded, but which may be perceived as more accessible for the pupils due to the non-existent language barrier. At the same time, the Italian site L’EcoPost, presents a list of songs under the label Canzoni sulla natura, sull’ambiente e l’impegno dei cantanti (‘Songs about nature, the environment and the commitment of the singers’), claiming: “la musica […] ha un impatto ambientale e, cosa più importante, può contagiare le persone tramite la potenza delle note e delle parole” ‘the music […] has an effect on the environment, and more importantly, it can infect people through the power of their notes ant words’. The article aims to outline how selected music videos conceptualize the environment and the need to deal with it sustainably, to what extent the verbal, visual and sound levels play a role or interact with each other and what implications this has for the discussion with the topic of sustainability in Italian lessons.