Cross-sectional studies have shown the connections between oral language, reading, and writing skills, but there has been limited longitudinal research, especially in primary school. This study examined the relationships between oral narrative, reading, and writing skills in a longitudinal sample of 80 Italian-speaking primary school children…

Plurilingual competence or repertoire of languages refers to all individuals being potentially plurilingual. As plurilingual competence and language repertoires are individual, assessment modes targeted to the individual and localized to the context should be encouraged. This study explored and depicted the plurilingual profile of Italian Studies…

Purpose: This study examined the language and nonverbal inhibitory control skills of Italian monolingual and bilingual typically developing (TD) preschoolers with Italian as their second language and of age-matched monolingual and bilingual peers with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: Four groups of preschoolers were enrolled: 30 TD…

The abrupt transition from face-to-face (F2F) to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted students' learning experiences in many ways. This survey-based study investigated the perceptions of 117 university students enrolled in beginner, intermediate, and advanced foreign language courses (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) of their…

The aim of this study was to investigate, using an eye-tracking tool, the processes behind the exploration of written texts performed by deaf people with different language skills and different educational backgrounds. Our sample comprised 36 deaf participants (12 of whom use Italian sign language most of the time, 12 who use Italian only, and 12…

The present study aimed to investigate the communicative characteristics of children with cochlear implants (CIs) and their mothers in interaction, whether and how they differ from those of mother-child dyads with normal hearing, and whether mother and child influence each other over the first year after implantation. Eighteen Italian-speaking…

The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children's narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children's literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public…

It has been shown that morphological skills are particularly enhanced in bilingual children, whereas they are compromised in dyslexics. The aim of this work is that of investigating how bilingualism interacts with dyslexia in a task measuring the subject's morphological abilities, to verify if the advantage typically found in bilingualism arises…

This paper provides an analytical account of a speaking activity, which was designed and delivered by the authors in order to help modern languages finalist students to further develop their intercultural competence. It argues that even finalists coming back from their year abroad might struggle with making sense of cultural differences. The paper…

One of the most popular and widely used parent report instruments for assessing early language acquisition is the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (MB-CDI). This study compares normative data of the Italian Words and Sentences complete form (WS-CF) and short form (WS-SF). The samples included 752 children for the WS-CF and 816…

The relationship between first and second language in early vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children is still debated in the literature. This study compared the expressive vocabulary of 39 equivalently low-SES two-year-old bilingual children from immigrant families with different heritage languages (Romanian vs. Nigerian English) and the same…

We live in a digital world and our students are surrounded by technologies: it is essential that they learn how to use the digital tools available for education purposes. As for language teaching, among the most recent technologies we can find online dictionaries. They could play a key role to foster language competences, and yet they are not very…

This study aims to evaluate phonological competences and their correlations with lexical abilities in 2-year-old Italian-speaking children. Eighty-eight children (46 females) aged 25-32 months participated in the study. From the total sample, three subgroups of children with different lexical skills were extracted to identify phonological…

While research on language learner autonomy and Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) is abundant, few studies have sought to systematically explore the relationship between the two. By adopting a rigorous approach that identifies transparent inclusion and exclusion criteria, this paper presents a systematic review that seeks to identify: (1)…

This study explores the effectiveness of podcasting as an approach to project-based and experiential learning implemented in an intermediate Italian studies unit at an Australian university. In the project, students are asked to write and record a podcast script on a topic related to their experience as university students or to events concerning…