One of the thorniest aspects of teaching languages is developing students' vocabulary, yet it is impossible to be "an accurate and highly communicative language user with a very small vocabulary" (Milton, 2009, p. 3). Nation (2006) indicates that more vocabulary than previously thought is required to function well both at spoken and…

In 2008, the Faculty of Arts at The University of Melbourne embarked upon a major overhaul of curriculum in nine languages: Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese in the Asia Institute; and French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish in the School of Languages and Linguistics. This article details the changes to the beginners' Italian…

The use of reflective tasks, such as journals, as a means to enhance learning is not uncommon in higher education. However, the formative value of reflective tasks is not easily reconciled in tertiary settings where assessment requirements traditionally favour product over process. While learner perception and resolution of this tension have…

In this paper, we describe an initial exploratory study designed to compare the outcomes of online listening and online text-based tasks in the context of the study of Italian at The University of Melbourne. Our findings allow us to characterise online listening and online reading as a qualitative difference between deep and surface approaches to…