Grammar teaching in Italy

[Giulio Bajona in 2020]  With regard to Italy, I agree with what your informant said in 1997 and it’s actually good to see that the situation has not changed from his generation to mine. I have to say, though, I remember going into quite some depth already when I was in elementary school. I remember we used to do both a ‘grammatical’ and a ‘logical’ analysis of sentences; the former used to focus on word classes, whereas with the latter you’d identify the different syntactic roles within the sentence (subject, predicate, complements etc.).

It is also true that in Italy you can choose the type of high school you go to after middle school. I chose Classics and therefore studied Italian grammar for another five years, alongside Latin and Ancient Greek. But I’m pretty sure that, regardless of your choice, you always end up having some Italian grammar.

[Fabio Rinaldi in 1997] I certainly remember doing at school in Italy the kind of grammatical study that you are interested in. As I’m 28 now it’s not that much ago. I think this is more or less a standard. You start by doing a little introduction (basically just the classification of words) at the elementary school (5-10), then you do a bit more (including some study of grammatical functions) at the intermediate school (10-13), and much more is normally done at the high school (13-18), depending also on the kind of high school you go to. While elementary and intermediate schools have a common nationwide curriculum, high schools differ on a kind of “orientation” (science vs literature vs technical subjects). I think I did quite a lot of grammar, despite the fact that I had choosen a technical subject.