Abstract

Using one’s voice is a part of everybody’s personal identity. Learners just getting to grips with a new language may sometimes feel in difficulty when they have to articulate sounds or prosodic structures which are different from those of their own language and far from their experiences: unfamiliar and foreign. Furthermore, the learner’s attitude towards the new language can be negatively influenced by frequent prejudices. This contribution proposes new approaches to teaching oral German language which are quite different from those offered by textbooks used in Italian schools. These approaches start from the sound of the language as a whole and consider rhythm, syllabic structure and articulatory energy – parameters which are not typically dealt with in the classroom. Moreover, they are contrastive, as students’ mother tongue cannot be excluded from the FL acquisition process, and they are aimed not only at dispelling stereotypes about the “uglyµ and “hardµ German language, but also at stimulating learners’ intrinsic motivation so that their adventure inside the German language may contribute, by means of discovering otherness, to developing their own identities.