Multilingualism is often associated with advantages for acquiring additional languages. Theoretical approaches explain these advantages by assuming a Common Underlying Proficiency or a Metalinguistic Awareness. At the State Europe School in Berlin, students from different language backgrounds receive instruction in German and a partner language…

The global quarantine measures and restrictions have posed a challenge to the structure and procedure of university summative assessment process. Foreign Languages Acquisition and Linguistic Education assessment are interdisciplinary processes, informed by the nature of linguistic content and types of communicative and professional activities…

Although metaphors are essential tools in everyday communication and educational settings, the literature lacks evidence of effective training tools to promote metaphor comprehension in typical development. Grounding in theoretical pragmatics, we developed a novel metaphor comprehension training (MetaCom) for school-age children that focuses on…

On March 23rd, at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), all lectures were suspended for a week. During this time, both students and staff made a considerable effort to prepare the online delivery of courses. In this chapter we discuss the impact of COVID-19 on the Italian beginners courses offered in Semester 1. With no certainty of when the…

This article investigates the learning of two syntactic structures in Italian--Pre-possessive Determiner Article (PPDA) and Differential Object Marking--that each pose specific learning difficulties for Spanish-speaking learners of Italian (SSLI), resulting from the asymmetrical relationship with corresponding structures in the learners' L1…

This book presents an international range of conversation analytic (CA) studies of classroom interaction which all discuss their empirical findings in terms of their theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of second language studies and their potential pedagogical relevance. The volume is thus unique in its focus on the…

Alderson teaches us that, "progress should be the aim of all learning". With the purpose of ensuring progress and enhancing first year students' learning of Italian as a second language, research into feedback and repair was undertaken at The University of Western Australia. The research--funded by the UWA Centre for the Advancement of…

The purpose of this paper is to present an experimental study on summative assessment in translation teaching. The paper emphasises the need to use, as an alternative to traditional assessment (i.e. the translation of a text under exam conditions), multidimensional assessment based on a range of criterion-referenced and competence-based assessment…

This overview of seven years of research on language learning and teaching in Austria reflects a period of steady growth for the language teaching and learning research community, a development due to a national policy agenda aiming for a stronger research base in teacher education. The target languages of the teaching and learning processes…

Our paper aims at analysing the linguistic "features" produced by Arabic learners of Italian as a foreign language. There are published studies of common errors for Arab students of Italian (Della Puppa, 2006; Giacalone Ramat et al., 2001). However, this study introduces the standardized language assessment, namely the CILS test of…

The aim of this study is to introduce a new platform, called "En Plein", for the kinesthetic practice of phonological skills by preschool children and to examine its feasibility in combination with more traditional teaching methods. The rationale is that the manipulation of structural phonological units is important to train the…

This study presents the way Parmaxi and Zaphiris's (2015) social constructionist framework was used in order to teach and learn vocabulary in an Italian for Specific Academic Purposes (ISAP) tertiary course. The participants (beginner students) were guided to build in groups an artifact, i.e a specific academic vocabulary collection. To do so,…

For the first time, the annual conference of the European Association for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (EUROCALL) took place in Sweden. The conference took place at the Faculty of Education on historic ground on the old fortification walls of Carolus Dux from the 17th century right in the centre of the city. This year's host comprised the…

This handbook for teachers of Italian consists of a collection of 16 essays by noted professionals in the field of Italian instruction: (1) "Fundamentals of Language Learning and Language Instruction," by A. Papalia; (2) "Linguistic Methodology and the Teacher of Italian," by R.J. Di Pietro; (3) "Preparation for Language Teaching," by F.J. Bosco;…

Discusses a study designed to verify the validity and effectiveness of the summary as a teaching and testing tool. The subjects were Italian students enrolled in second year French at the university level. (CFM)