Legal Italian in Brazil: a research

Abstract

This article is a part of the survey on the teaching of Italian language in Brazil, based on the analysis performed with textbooks of Italian for jurists, and on proposals for courses carried out with Portuguese-speaking students, who work in the area of the Law. We started discussing briefly the emergence, in Italy, of the use of “vulgar” in legal documents and the development of the language through time, until the importance of the Italian language for those who study Law in Brazil. From the analysis made of the existing textbooks, we taught a course to students indicated in those books (intermediate level) to investigate advantages and difficulties faced by the students. Based on the results of this first course, we designed a new course for absolute beginners in Italian language, working in an integrated way the four skills (listening, understanding, reading and writing), according to the studies by Balboni (2010), in which the students studied both the common language and the specific language of Law. We based the research on the pioneering work done by Candido et al. (1977), as well as the ones by Celani et al. (2009) and Mordente e Ferroni (2011a; 2011b); and we brought our observations, hoping to expand the research in the field of Italian with specific purposes.