This case study explores the cognitive and emotional development of a university student using the schema of a complete orienting basis of action (SCOBA) in her learning of Italian as a foreign language. The article follows Marie, a 19-year-old undergraduate student, as she used a SCOBA that illustrated the concept of Genre and Register in…

Post-communicative methodologies nowadays provide instructors with multiple curricular models to reimagine their syllabi, design creative assignments, and prepare their lessons. Yet, challenging topics are still often avoided, fearing students' limited language proficiency. Conversely, compelling content--carefully presented and pedagogically…

International students, especially those studying in English language institutes at universities in the United States, often struggle to create connections with local students and the host community. Learners of non-English languages also struggle to find opportunities to practice languages that are uncommon in the surrounding community. This…

Devising a writing system, or graphisation, is a fundamental aspect of corpus planning that no language can take too lightly. This paper begins with a general introduction to graphisation and to Italian regional languages, followed by an analysis of the different orthographies in use so far or proposed for the main regional languages in Italy,…

Background: The purpose of this research is to analyze the perception of teachers and their thinking about two specific and functional issues which are often deemed to be controversial, that is, the acquisition, by recently arrived migrant students of the host language and the role that the professional services of a cultural mediator may have in…

The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in…

Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities (i.e., transitional probabilities, or TPs) relevant to segmenting words in fluent speech. However, there is debate about whether tracking TPs results in representations of possible words. Infants show preferential learning of sequences with high TPs (HTPs) as object labels relative to those with…

This study focuses on the assessment of working memory and linguistic skills in 21 Italian-Russian speaking bilingual children who were born in Italy and inherited Russian from their parents. Their performance was compared to that of 21 monolingual Russian-speaking and 21 monolingual Italian-speaking peers. For the assessment of the two languages…

The construct of psychological flow bridges several areas of second language learning interest, including motivation, investment, self-efficacy, and autonomy. Flow, characterized by intense focus on an enjoyable activity that is at once challenging and accessible, creates conditions that have been linked to learning. Research interest in flow has…

Despite empirical evidence from research showing that the use of text-picture combination is beneficial for second language (L2) learning, little is known about the effectiveness of reading comic books for incidental vocabulary acquisition. This study investigated the effects of engaging with comic books on incidental learning of L2 Italian…

This study investigated three Japanese L2 learners who joined a government-funded, short-term study abroad program in the USA during their first year of college. Four years after the program, we interviewed the learners about their overseas experiences. We also asked what they had done during their university years after the program. We then…

According to a language-integrated view of spelling development, learning to spell involves the same language-learning skills across alphabetic systems. A prediction based on this view is that the same spelling training should be equally effective for learning to spell in a shallow (Italian, native language) or an opaque (English, additional…

In the context of an undergraduate program in modern languages that includes the learning of French, Italian, Portuguese, and German in addition to English, this paper problematizes anglonormativity; that is, the dominant discourses of English as the taken-for-granted language of development. From the particular context of Colombia, where the…

Background: Reading can be assessed using different materials, including non-words and texts. Unlike reading words or non-words, reading a text may be supported by reading comprehension, and the extent of this support could change with the amount of schooling. Aim: The present study aimed to examine how reading decoding in a shallow orthography…

The relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer's feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that…