The song 'La ballata dell'amore cieco (o della vanità)' (1966), by Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André (1940-1999), offers students opportunities to practise their language skills, stimulate their cultural appreciation, and expand their knowledge of a musical and poetic form (the ballad), while reflecting on the close connection between…

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…

Spelling skills have been identified as one of the major barriers to written text production in young English writers. By contrast oral language skills and text generation have been found to be less influential in the texts produced by beginning writers. To date, our understanding of the role of spelling skills in transparent orthographies is…

This study investigates Italian and French students' grammatical problems while reading in German as an L3 or L4. For the study, we developed a reading test which consists of invented encyclopaedia articles on imaginary animals. These articles enabled us to test various grammatical structures for their receptive difficulty. This paper discusses…

The 23rd EUROCALL conference was held in Cyprus from the 24th to the 27th of August 2016. The theme of the conference this year was "CALL Communities and Culture." It offered a unique opportunity to hear from real-world CALL practitioners on how they practice CALL in their communities, and how the CALL culture has developed in local and…