The Extraordinary Life of Foreign Language Learners: Harnessing the Rewards of the Multilingual Experience and Becoming Intercultural Mediators is Dr. Pacchioni’s latest contribution to foreign language and culture education. The guidebook, written with the linguistic Gian Marco Farese from the Università Statale of Milan, conducts a long-overdue discussion of the more abstract and complex issues surrounding the foreign language learning experience, its deeper rewards, and its important implications for intercultural communication and mediation.
Through an accessible writing style, a sequential chapter structure addressing specific learning areas, the book counteracts a widespread lack of intellectual, theoretical, and motivational reach in current language education, and highlights vital issues of diversity and inclusion. The book illustrates theoretical notions through a wide range of examples from multiple languages, viewed comparatively, as well as vivid life accounts of individuals successfully working and living across different languages and cultures. The Extraordinary Life of Foreign Language Learners provides answers to doubts and concerns that usually impede foreign language learners and offers inspirational points to advance along the demanding path of foreign language learning with a fresh and motivating perspective.
The book is currently available via several online stores, including Amazon.it, IBS.it, Hoepli.it
The Extraordinary Life of Foreign Language Learners resolves one of the great puzzles of academic writing: how to convey first-rate scholarship with heartfelt affection for the subject. The authors, declaring their affection in the introduction and maintaining high scholarly standards throughout, may have done more than they intended. They have written a book about the particulars of language learning that can equally be read as a love letter for the life of the mind.
– M. Andrew Moshier, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Communication, Chapman University
This innovative and remarkably interdisciplinary work extols the unmatched richness of being able to think, act, and exist “between” human cultures that comes from sustained foreign language study. The Extraordinary Life of Foreign Language Learners urges us to reflect on the vital importance of communication —with one’s self, the Other, and the world as we know it—with openness, curiosity, and a deep appreciation for difference.
– Colleen Ryan, Ph.D., Director of Italian Undergraduate Studies, Indiana University Bloomington
