Handwriting is a useful skill through education, yet handwriting difficulties are common in students with Specific Learning Difficulties (SpLD), including Developmental Coordination Disorder. There are few practical tools to assess legibility, among these the Handwriting Legibility Scale (HLS) shows good reliability and validity for 9- to…

In the present scientific era which prefers evidence-based educational research and methodological gold standards, 'rigour', 'discipline' and the 'systematic' serve as standardising and homogenising concepts and as powerful identifiers of 'normal science' in the context of historical and cultural contingencies. These concepts serve to construct…

This paper provides information about a multilingual (Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, and French) virtual card game for computers and smartphones. Facing the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this game allows students to play remotely or face-to-face with friends in a fun and cooperative environment and review the topics related…

Research indicates that students frequently struggle to apply their knowledge of organic compounds' structural theory to understand the concepts related to resonance and learn to use curved arrows to write resonance structures. Educators have developed educational tools and methodologies to aid students in overcoming their learning difficulties.…

This article claims to provide evidence on whether content-subject and cognitive achievement vary in CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and non-CLIL classrooms in the framework of a newly introduced CLIL programme in Italy. A standardized and validated science test (TIMSS) was administered to a sample 988 fourth-grade students. The…

This article presents the findings of an online survey conducted amongst bi- (English, Italian) and trilingual (English, Italian and dialect) Italo-Australian youth, exploring self-assessed language competence, self-reported language choice in various communicative situations, and attitudes towards heritage languages. These young people appear…

Analyses of elicited pantomime, primarily of English-speaking children, show that preschool-aged children are more likely to symbolically represent an object with gestures depicting an object's form rather than its function. In contrast, anecdotal reports of spontaneous gesture production in younger children suggest that children use multiple…

Narratives have been extensively studied in recent decades, but studies investigating differences and similarities in the narrative features from a cross-cultural or cross-linguistic point of view are limited. This study investigated the narrative language of typically developing monolingual four- and eight-year-old Finnish, Italian and Canadian…

We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments.…

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two…

Purpose: The Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989) was used to compare Italian and English lexical development. The authors addressed the issue of universal versus language-specific aspects of lexical development by testing language, age, and gender effects on vocabulary scores and by comparing vocabulary composition across languages.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to obtain information to characterize potential trainees seeking training programs about organic farming in the form of mobile learning. This information is expected to allow for establishing a set of guidelines to design mobile training opportunities that could match the potential clients' wishes.…

This study investigated micro- and macrostructural text features, and the impact of language-specific skills, on the bilingual, persuasive writing of 41 high school students learning English in Italy. Participants composed persuasive essays on 2 topics, each in Italian and English, and completed spelling and sentence generation tasks in both…

The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that--in early interlanguages--the perfective past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occurring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general…

Many languages use vast numbers of words borrowed from English, and modified (clipped) to use the first part of the word only. The paper provides examples, mainly from Italian, examining the linguistic reasons for such clipped forms and presents several clipped Italian terms used in English, noting that the same thing can happen in reverse. (SMN)