This study investigates the relationship between School Library and Students' achievement on a population sample of 9896 Schools. Many international researches confirmed the importance of the School Library for the Students learning. Recently the IEA PIRLS survey has revealed a positive relationship between the Reading comprehension performance…

This article shares pedagogical insights from a qualitative study examining the use of immersive social virtual worlds (SVWs) in language teaching and learning. Recognizing the language learning affordances of immersive virtual environments, this research examines the beliefs and practices of 'Karelia Kondor,' an avatar-learner and teacher of…

Communication in international meetings represents a challenge for the participants, who need to make choices about the language(s) they use to co-construct meaning and guarantee the success of their work. In this context, plurilingual interactions may offer an invaluable opportunity for power balanced relations and intercultural flexibility. In…

This paper will present the findings of a wide-scale research aimed at studying the phenomenon of Child Language Brokering (henceforth CLB) in Italy. After providing a description of recent immigration patterns and the provision of language services in Italy, and an overview of current research in this field, this study will discuss narrative data…

The present study examined continuity/discontinuity and stability/instability of noun and verb production measures in 30 child-mother dyads observed at 16 and 20 months, and predictive relations with the acquisition of nouns and verbs at 24 months. Children exhibited significant discontinuity and robust stability in the frequency of nouns and…

This article expands the study of other-initiated repair in conversation--when one party signals a problem with producing or perceiving another's turn at talk--into the domain of visual bodily behavior. It presents one primary cross-linguistic finding about the timing of visual bodily behavior in repair sequences: if the party who initiates repair…

In this paper, we present two versions of a learning game developed respectively at the Grenoble Alpes and Bologna University. This research focuses on a digital game aimed at favouring the learners' "playful attitude" and harnessing it towards "accuracy" aspects of language learning (lexicon and morphology, here). The game,…

Like other anglophone countries, the UK is experiencing a language 'crisis', in that fewer and fewer students opt to study a foreign language (FL) beyond the compulsory phase, and that the UK's language skills do not match its economic needs. Despite strong statements of commitments to increase FL uptake, decline in FL uptake in the UK's four…

Bilingual children show a number of advantages in the domain of communication. The aim of the current study was to investigate whether differences in interactions are present before productive language skills emerge. For a duration of 5 minutes, 64 parents and their 14-month-old infants explored a decorated room together. The coordination of their…

Our paper aims at analysing the linguistic "features" produced by Arabic learners of Italian as a foreign language. There are published studies of common errors for Arab students of Italian (Della Puppa, 2006; Giacalone Ramat et al., 2001). However, this study introduces the standardized language assessment, namely the CILS test of…

There is a general recognition that learning of foreign languages is in decline in Australia. This paper uses the social constructivist theory as a conceptual framework to report on a project where university language students supported their high school peers in the learning of their specialist language in New South Wales, Australia. The project…

This study aimed to investigate specific associations between structural and acoustic characteristics of infant-directed (ID) speech and word recognition. Thirty Italian-acquiring children and their mothers were tested when the children were 1;3. Children's word recognition was measured with the looking-while-listening task. Maternal ID speech was…

This is a longitudinal case study of two groups of students (24 students in total) from the Foreign Languages Department of the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras. This research deals with the acquisition of the French adverbial pronouns "en" and "y" through two different teaching approaches, the implicit-inductive teaching…

The object of this article is to analyse the development of ethnic Italian schools in Rio Grande do Sul during the years of colonisation in the nineteenth century (1875-1900), during which time Italian immigrants were put under a double process of nationalisation. On the one side, commencing with Imperial Brazil, and then more specifically in…

This article describes the innovations introduced into the undergraduate "ab initio" Italian language programme at the School of Languages at the University of Bristol and the use of a range of online tools and resources. It evaluates to what extent the innovations have enhanced the students' experience. The article describes the course…