From 1960 to the Present Day: The Influence of the Gestalt Theory on Didactic Devices for Language Teaching

Abstract

The present work discusses from a historical perspective the influence that the Gestalt Theory has had in Italy on the development of language teaching models from the 1960s to the present day. Different sources have thus been investigated, taking into account in particular the Venetian school of educational linguistics. The second part of the article is devoted to the presentation of a model created for teaching and learning Italian for study purposes, that is a practical proposal also indebted to the Gestalt theory. The model results from the attempt to transfer to the field of educational linguistics both findings made available by psychological research and by neuroscientific studies, in particular those which rely on the embodied nature of language.