Hello everyone!

I am soo sorry Im writing so late,but I’ve been so busy with school since its a start of 6th year.

Anyways I wanna share with you my whole experience in Italy.First of all,I would like to thank the judges again for picking me,and giving me the opportunity to go to Italy and study Italian language for whole two weeks!

The trip was absolutely AMAZING!  Ive enjoyed every minute of it. The people i have met while being there are friends that I will never forget. The atmosphere there was great,everyone was very friendly and the staff was so helpful and fun! I had a smile on my face for whole two weeks being there.

The hotel we stayed in was very nice and clean.The rooms were cleaned every day,which I though was big luxury! The staff was very helpful and friendly.The rooms were quite big had their own bathrooms and balcony (great thing to have) .The food was also very good,loots and loots of pasta. Im a fan of past so I was in heaven!

The classes of Italian that we had every day except Thursdays and Sundays were very helpful. I feel I have greatly improved my vocabulary in Italian as I was speaking lots of Italian with the Italian students there.I though it was excellent that there were Italian people too because we shared our language knowledge.I have benefited greatly in this trip.The teachers were very helpful and understanding.

I was suprised of how friendly and nice Italian people are! I mean I expected them to be nice,but walking down the street and having random people that pass by you and greet you…I felt great.Italian people are soo welcoming and friendly!

The area around was beautiful,the beach was literally 5 mins away from the hotel,there was lots of green,3 or 4 basketball,tennis and soccer pitches.The sea was clean and warm,and the weather was sooo hot! The town of Lignano was very nice especially in the evening!

I will never ever forget my trip to Italy!! I recommend to anyone,any age,any gender because anyone would enjoy it! Im hoping to go back next year and meet another bunch of great people.Once again thanks to the judges for giving me this great opportunity

Grazie, bacio! x

Cari ragazzi, prima di tutto complimenti a tutti voi: siete stati bravissimi! Scegliere i due vincitori della borsa di studio è stato veramente difficile. Avete tutti dimostrato una forte motivazione e un grandissimo entusiasmo.

Come sapete i vincitori sono Branka Tvrda (Ratoath Community College) e Marian Ivanov (Larkin Community College). I criteri di cui abbiamo tenuto conto nel giudicare i candidati sono stati il livello di competenza linguistica raggiunto in rapporto al numero di anni di studio, la spontaneità nel parlare, la possibilità o meno o di passare un periodo in Italia in passato, il contenuto e la presentazione.

In generale la qualità dei vostri filmini e la naturalezza con cui state di fronte alla telecamera ci hanno colpito molto. È stato un piacere guardarvi e riguardarvi, e spesso abbiamo anche riso. Dovete essere orgogliosi di voi stessi!

Vi auguriamo il meglio per il futuro e speriamo di vedervi spesso sul blog. Avete molto da dare.

More information on the language camp can be found here

• Italian is a significant language. There is a tendency to see Italian as a language you learn for fun – ask people who speak a few languages why they learned Italian… they’ll tell you how much fun it is, how beautiful the language is, you’ll hear about the art and the fashion and the opera… then there are the Italians who will tell us it came before French and being the closest language to Latin makes it superior, that back in the Middle Ages anyone who was educated had to be able to speak Italian… these are potentially all legitimate reasons for learning Italian but there are other reasons why we need to be offering more Italian.
• Italy is the 4^th largest economy in Europe, it has the same economic output as France or the UK.  If you look at trade figures for the first 6 months of this year on the cso website, the value of exports from Ireland to Italy was 1,631 million euro, that’s more than the value of exports to China, it’s half the value of exports to Germany, it’s 2/3 the value of exports to France. Even if you group together all the Francophone countries (ignoring the fact that Italian is also spoken in parts of Switzerland), the value of exports to Italy is still 10% of the combined value of those. Italy is also the 3rd largest importer of Irish beef.
• The number of native speakers of Italian is not far behind the number of native speakers of French – it’s estimated that there are about 68 million native speakers of French but there are 62 million of Italian and there are large communities of Italian speakers across the world. For example, 1.5 million in Brazil, another 1.5 million in Argentina, 1 million in the US, another million between Canada and the UK.
• There are plenty of well-qualified teachers in Ireland because we have well-developed third level provision, with appropriate avenues for teacher qualification.
• We have excellent resources and materials for teaching Italian including the new textbook In bocca al lupo! for Senior Cycle, Giro d’Italia for Junior Cycle, and resources available online at www.languagesinitiative.ie
• In the Leaving Certificate examinations in 2010, there was one candidate of Italian for every 87 candidates of French which is an imbalance, not only in the context of encouraging linguistic diversity, and championing plurilingualism, but also in terms of the economic importance of Italy to Ireland.  Historically, French has been important for many reasons but at a conservative estimate a more realistic balance should be in the order of 10 students of French for every student of Italian.  This would no doubt result in an increase in opportunities for trade and exchange with Italy.