With increasing mobility of people across the world, there is a pressing need to develop evidence-based teaching practices that lead to high-quality education, which serves the needs of inclusive societies and social and epistemic justice. This book presents cutting-edge qualitative case-study research across a range of educational contexts,…

In the past decade, techniques traditionally used in the audiovisual translation (AVT) industry have been applied to foreign language teaching (FL) with promising results. Both teachers and researchers have provided useful data on various AVT typologies (i.e., subtitling, dubbing, audio description) to improve specific learning areas: vocabulary…

This article illustrates the findings on multilingualism related to the educational sphere in the city of Rome, within the scope and theoretical framework of the international project LUCIDE (Languages in Urban Communities--Integration and Diversity for Europe). Particularly, it describes the type of linguistic and cultural support offered to…

The speed of technological advance in the mobile phone, netbook and tablet markets has meant that learners increasingly have access to digital devices capable of enhancing their learning experience. This case study reports on how language learners, taking Italian as an option on the Institution Wide Languages Programme (IWLP) at Coventry…

This article concerns a special learning space populated by Italians and Italian learners: the choir formed in Brisbane as a joint initiative between a community association and the Italian teaching staff at Griffith University. Our aim, in involving our students in the choir, was to bring them together with L1 speakers in an environment that…

This paper looks at how corpus data was used to design an Italian as an L2 language learning programme and how it was evaluated by students. The study focuses on the acquisition of Italian verb-noun collocations by Chinese native students attending a ten month long Italian language course before enrolling at an Italian university. It describes how…

Interlingual subtitling has been extensively investigated for language learning and teaching purposes in the last decade. However, there is a lack of research into the creation of subtitles as a means of intercultural learning. This article is a first empirical attempt to verify the potential of subtitling for intercultural language education. It…

Inspired by the unexpected results of a standardized questionnaire survey of Swiss university students' motivation and attitudes toward English, the paper discusses the influence of global and local contexts on language learners' motivation and identity. As a result of the unprecedented spread of English as a foreign language (Crystal, 2003;…

The use of songs and music in the Languages classroom is common practice. Research literature contains positive statements about music as a cognitive, linguistic and affective enhancer. Music and Languages risk becoming marginalised in the Western Australian curriculum due to curriculum pressures. Reduction of time in these learning areas could…

Web-based video is one of the technologies which can support meaningful learning from practice--in addition to practical benefits such as accessibility of practices, flexibility in updating information, and incorporating video into multimedia resources. A multiple case study was set up on the use of a web-based video learning environment in two…

This article addresses the issue of teacher codeswitching in the teaching of Italian in Malta. The analysis of teacher codeswitching shows that the learners' first language (L1), Maltese, is used as a pedagogical tool to enhance language learning. Teachers frequently resort to Maltese to provide more learner-friendly explanations of grammatical…

For many language learners, studying a foreign language is a compulsory, high-stakes activity. It is perhaps for this reason that positive feelings about language learning are rarely mentioned in the literature on language learning. The focus is predominantly on negative feelings: the anxiety caused by being asked to speak in the foreign language…

Wikis are increasingly seen as useful tools for promoting active student engagement and collaborative language learning. Unlike most applications of wikis to foreign/second language learning thus far reported on, ours concerns complete beginners. In this paper, we focus on our approach to and evaluation of the integration of wikis into our…

This article describes the experience of integrating a class blog into an advanced Italian course, in order to provide an out-of-class forum for language practice and for sharing course-related ideas and information. It also reports on an evaluation of the blog's effectiveness, drawing on an analysis of the students' blog contributions and their…

This paper describes the author's experience with a pilot course of Italian in SL®[superscript 2]. The course is part of a PhD research on "Exploring the potential of virtual worlds to promote Intercultural Awareness in students learning Italian as a Foreign Language." In the paper the author will justify her choice of virtual worlds for…