The use of innovative language in education is a current and pressing issue in a digital landscape where knowledge and skills are acquired in much more complex and fragmented ways than in the past (Di Blas, 2016; Selvaggi, Sicignano, & Vollono, 2007). We are experiencing a lot of interest in flipped classrooms, interactive learning…

This article introduces the CELI corpus, a new learner corpus of written Italian consisting of ca. 600,000 tokens, evenly distributed among CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) proficiency levels B1, B2, C1 and C2. The collected texts derive from the language certification exams administered by the University for Foreigners…

Italy is characterized by a considerable amount of language variation. Only a few spoken vernaculars enjoy institutional support and are officially recognized as minority languages. Among these, Friulian is one of the largest in terms of number of speakers. In the past decade, the assessment of Friulian language vitality has yielded discordant…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. Friulian is a Romance language, traditionally recognised as part of the Rhaeto-Romance sub-family. It is spoken in Friûl (in Friulian)/Friuli (in Italian), a territory…

In this paper we draw attention to people who journey from one temporal and spatial setting towards another in the 'South', who aspire to a reconfigured sense of belonging, prosperity and wellbeing, and their multilinguality and multilingualisms. Through three vignettes of journeys we illustrate how in changing of place that linguistic diversities…

This paper will present a translation project with second-year bachelor students together with some observational data. The students firstly translated an academic abstract from Italian (their first language) to English by using the language resources they were acquainted with. Then they translated a second abstract by using a pre-compiled offline…

This paper concerns a virtual exchange project between the University of Virginia (UVa), United States, and an upper-secondary school in Pavia, Italy. Centred on the question of gender equality, the project has been designed to take place over three years (2018-2021) with a direct reference to Robert O'Dowd's transnational model of virtual…

In 2016 the University of Padova and its Language Centre ("Centro Linguistico di Ateneo" -- CLA) became involved in the two-year "Cultura e accoglienza" Project (see Dalziel and Piazzoli in this volume), the aim of which was to encourage around 30 refugees and asylum seekers to pursue university studies by means of a…

Over the last few decades the international dimension of higher education has grown significantly as internationalization has become a strategic goal for many governments. Students on the move worldwide reached five million in 2015 and their number is increasing at a rate of 10% each year. Many of these students need to develop proficiency in the…

Learning has been moving out of classrooms into virtual and physical spaces for over a decade now (Naismith, Lonsdale, Vavoula, & Sharples, 2004). It is becoming mobile "in space", i.e. carried across various domains (workplace, home, places of leisure), "in time", as it encompasses different moments of the day, and in…

An informal organisation that is becoming quite influential in the spread of Italian in Italy, as well as abroad, is the "Accademia della Crusca" which began its activities during the Renaissance, under quite different auspices. Founded in Florence in 1582-1583, this Academy was inspired by the theories of Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), a…

This paper presents language learners as social networkers and describes and discusses the types of users that can be identified by analysing the content created by them using a situated mobile language learning app, LingoBee, based on the idea of crowd sourcing. Borrowing ideas from other studies conducted on social network users, we can identify…

This article seeks to assess the impact of V-Pal (Virtual Partnerships for All Languages) on the student language learning experience within a conventional UK higher education (HE) curriculum. V-Pal is an innovative computer-mediated language scheme, based on a reciprocal, distance-learning language project, run by the University of Manchester in…

Describes a workshop offered at the Middlebury College Italian School on contemporary Italy. The morning sessions consisted of a discussion by a native Italian scholar of contemporary Italy and of related readings and the afternoon sessions consisted of readings and discussions and hands-on activities in lesson preparation. (SED)

Due to the peculiar nature of news texts, the adoption of a theory of "localisation" rather than conventional translation theories accounts more easily for both the commercial nature and the global scale of news distribution. News texts are global products which are distributed through a localisation process involving not only reception…