L'ipermedia nella didattica delle lingue

This contribution aims to present a project that considers the possible use of hypermedia in teaching Italian as a foreign or second language. Building hypermedia for language teaching involves gathering a number of multimedia documents such as picture files, audio files, videos, texts, interactive communications like ‘chats’ or ‘tandem’ and so on, on a specific topic, so as to create a melting pot of information connected together via links, which include images, sounds and tastes, among which the students can navigate. It is a melting pot which takes on a virtual dimension, and which turns into a conceptual map (Balboni, 2012) of the student who links language to reality. The multicode environment is thus transferred to a hypermedia level where both traditional teaching and nontraditional teaching can integrate and form a new type of learning that may be defined hyper-learning. Hypermedia, as used in language teaching, provide increased motivation in a society flooded by digital technology. Potentially, hypermedia can include several technologies used in teaching and allow teachers to take advantage of methodological innovation with an everincreasing potentiality.