Learning a foreign language enables people to get to know different cultures. People who know different cultures get richer. So, their prejudices against people are destroyed. Thus, a foreign language student may both improve himself and become a better person. In this context, the aim of the present study is to learn the thoughts of Turkish…

This study addresses the role of the body in the pedagogy of Italian as a second language. Given that the understanding of meanings and functions of body movements in combination with speech can enrich language pedagogy, we organized a study to investigate whether context of learning determines more or less awareness of the body in Italian…

This study examines the extent to which the motivation of university students of Italian in Melbourne (Australia) is influenced by the visibility of a local Italian community. The research relies on data collected by open-ended questions and two Likert items from a survey study (n?=?74) as well as in-depth interviews (n?=?5). The findings show…

This article investigates what kind of multilingual operations are carried out as migrant and transnational creative writers deploy in their fictions in Italian (often an acquired language) the languages which they hold in their personal repertoires. Exploring first the linguistic, political and cultural implications of what Algerian author, Amara…

The refugee is the person who has fled his or her country for reasons of war, racial discrimination, vengeance, sectarian massacres or other reasons. Many refugees have left everything behind them to reach a society that is completely different from their own, creating many challenges. Perhaps the most important of these challenges is to learn the…

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.…

After a brief summary of the literature on interference and code switching, research with adult Sardinians living in Rome is discussed to determine the relationship between dialectal phonological interference and the degree of identification with the new culture. (26 references) (CFM)

Considers the validity of applying common assessment instruments and scales to assess the language skills of Australian school-age language learners from different first-language backgrounds. Findings reveal a strong relationship between home exposure to the language and the level of performance on the listening and reading components of the…

Essays that consider the way that women are portrayed in foreign language textbooks are presented. The selected essays were submitted to a competition sponsored by the Federation Internationale des Professeurs de Langues Vivantes, which requested that language teachers assess such concerns as: (1) whether women were described in a stereotyped way;…