Letter to students 342

The letters form a major part of the archive and always remained a central aspect of Mario’s practice as a language educator, but for reasons of privacy, only Mario’s side of correspondence with learners is included, while the names of students and trainees have been redacted. In some cases, some of the content of Mario’s letters has also been redacted, where that content would have made the addressee easily identifiable. Clearly, this necessary editorial restraint only leaves the reader with half the story: we read what Mario wrote, but we never see the replies he received. However, where the correspondence developed, as it often did, into a chain of written exchanges, we get quite a strong sense of the content, if not the style or tone, of the replies, as naturally, Mario very often refers to what his correspondents have said, and thus we can infer much of the substance of the replies without actually reading them.

Thinking in L1.