THAI LANGUAGE

Mandatory course of the B.A. program in Languages, Cultures and Societies of Asia and North Africa with Southeast Asia.

Learning goals within the area of language, culture and humanities.

Knowledge and understanding:

- Basics of Thai language, spoken and written
- Cultural notions that are related to the learning of Thai language

Applying knowledge and understanding:

- Engage in conversations at a basic level
- Write and read small texts at a basic level
- Comply to cultural norms in conversations at a basic level
- Identify basic grammatical categories and their properties

Basic Level (A1) of the CEFR: “Can understand and use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases aimed at the satisfaction of needs of a concrete type. Can introduce themselves and others and can ask and answer questions about personal details such as where they live, people they know and things they have. Can interact in a simple way provided the other person talks slowly and clearly and is prepared to help.”

Interest in Thai language and culture.

This course develops basic communication skills that pertain to daily situations, such as greeting, introducing individuals, describing one's language abilities, shopping, expressing one's needs, ordering food, identifying countries and nationalities, describing individuals physically, and speaking about housing, family relations and professions.

The course also introduces the phonetic system, the vowels (short/long), the diphthongs, the tone system, key consonants from the three classes (middle, high and low), tone modifiers, ending consonants, live/dead syllables, and consonant clusters.

Mandatory:

Yuphaphan Hoongchamlong. 2007. Thai Language and Culture for Beginners 1. Distrubuted by University of Hawai’i Press


Further readings:

Smyth, D. 2002. Thai: An Essential Grammar. London and New York: Routledge

Songkran Bunjarat e Sabattini, Mario. 2017. Grammatica essenziale della lingua thai. Venezia: Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina

The course teacher will provide other materials via Moodle.

There will be two different sets of exams for students of Thai as a first language (enrolled to the Southeast Asia curriculum) and students of Thai as a second language (enrolled to other curricula).

THAI AS FIRST LANGUAGE

The pre-exam (at the end of MOD. 1) will be a pass/fail test.

The final exam (at the end of MOD. 2) will comprise two tests, written and oral, as follows.

Written test: questions in Thai and a translation from Thai to Italian. The test will not require a dictionary.

Oral test: conversation for a length of approximately 10 minutes.

The final mark will be the average of these two tests’ scores.

THAI AS SECOND LANGUAGE

The pre-exam (at the end of MOD. 1) will be a pass/fail test.

The final exam will be only oral. It will include a conversation and a reading comprehension for a total length of approximately 15 minutes.

Frontal teaching and exercises.

Italian

written and oral