Dramatic Interactions is a collection of essays on the flourishing and interdisciplinary subject of teaching foreign languages, literatures, and cultures through theater. With rich examples from a variety of commonly and less commonly taught languages, this book affirms both the relevance and effectiveness of using theater for foreign language learning in the most comprehensive sense of the term. It includes innovative approaches to specific theatrical texts and addresses numerous aspects of foreign language learning such as oral proficiency and communication, intercultural competence, the role of affect and motivation in foreign language study, multiple literacies, regional variations and dialect, literary analysis and adaptation, and the overall liberating effects of verbal and non-verbal self-expression in the foreign language. Dramatic Interactions renders accessible, efficacious, and enjoyable the study of languages, literatures, and cultures through theater with the hope of inspiring and facilitating the greater incorporation of theatrical texts and techniques in foreign language courses at every level.
About the Author: Colleen Ryan is Associate Professor and Director of Italian Language Instruction at Indiana University, USA. Her teaching spans the curriculum from first-semester language to literature and theater, to graduate courses on foreign language teaching methods. Ryan is the author of Sex, the Self, and the Sacred: Women in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini (University of Toronto Press, 2007) and co-editor, with Nicoletta Marini-Maio, of Set the Stage! Teaching Italian through Theater. Theories, Methods, and Practices (Yale University Press, 2009). Ryan's shorter publications include articles and chapters on Italian women writers, gender representations in Italian cinema, Italian curriculum development, teaching Italian through theater, and professional development for langauge teachers. She serves on the editorial board for Studi Pasoliniani and is currently writing a book on representations of madness in contemporary Italian cinema. Nicoletta Marini-Maio is Associate Professor of Italian at Dickinson College, USA, and Co-Editor of the international journal Quaderni del '900. Her interest in teaching pedagogy and scholarly activities have cross-fertilized ideas and provided insights both for her teaching and research. She has published articles and book chapters on the representation of the so-called years of lead (1970s) in Italian film and theater, coming of age in Italian film, and Paolo Sorrentino's cinema; co-edited with Ellen Nerenberg and Thomas Simpson a critical translation of Corpo di stato, by the Italian playwright Marco Baliani (forthcoming from Fairleigh University Press); and co-edited with Colleen Ryan the volume Set the Stage! Teaching Italian through Theater. Theories, Methods, and Practices (Yale University Press, 2009). She is completing a monograph on the cinematic and theatrical representations of the 1978 abduction and assassination of Italian statesman Aldo Moro, and is currently conducting research on the hyper-sexualization of women in Italian film and media.