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…

Video Remote Interpreting (VRI) is a modality of interpreting where the interpreter interacts with the other parties-at-talk through an audiovisual link without sharing the same physical interactional space. In dialogue settings, existing research on VRI has mostly drawn on the analysis of verbal behaviour to explore the dynamics of these…

The Italian language in the ethnically mixed coastal area of Slovenia is an official language, regulated by the principle of ethnic autochthony, which recognizes the rights of linguistic minorities regardless of their number of speakers. Slovenia has been always very sensitive toward its two national minorities (Italian and Hungarian) and set up…

This article reports on an autoethnography by two authors who analysed the interrelationship of their experiences as foreign language learners, educators, and researchers. Both participant-researchers had taken advantage of the accessibility of online learning resources to learn new languages, had incorporated digital tools into their teaching…

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…

The study of inclusion models has regained attention in light of recent migratory phenomena. In this context, research in the area of second language (L2) teaching methodologies occupies a central role because it examines the most effective teaching approaches to promote the learning of a language that will be instrumental in the inclusion of the…

This paper describes a project developed within an ongoing study at the University of Athens. In our previous studies we analyzed the errors of Greek learners of Italian language, using Learner Corpora evidence and we retrieved useful information about their interlanguage and its interaction to the language learning process. In this study we…

Despite a rapid growth of Open Educational Resource (OER) availability, Thoms and Thoms (2014) note that few empirical studies examine the impact of OERs on foreign language learning and teaching. This paper presents an action research study investigating the embedding of selected components of DigiLanguages, an OER for Digital Literacies (DLs)…

This study investigates the ways in which synchronous and asynchronous activities create an online language laboratory that mediates second language (L2) learning for 188 L2 university participants over a 6-week period. Completion of tasks and pre-, post-, and weekly surveys were analyzed. Statistical analyses were run on self-rated questions…

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,…

Focusing specifically on the negotiation of commonality, this study explores rapport building (Spencer-Oatey, 2000) in online intercultural text chat, where Australian students of Italian interact with L1 Italian speakers. Although the initial purpose of the examined chat exchanges is to facilitate L2 acquisition, analysis of transcripts indicates…

This chapter presents how I integrated Virtual Exchange (VE) programmes delivered by Soliya in two courses at an international undergraduate liberal arts and sciences college. In both cases the VE programme was fully integrated in the courses as a graded element. The students of beginner Italian participated in the four-week long Connect Express.…

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…

It had been hypothesized that, in developmental dyslexia (DD), an implicit learning deficit explains children's problems in encoding the phoneme-grapheme correspondences underlying the writing system and thus the development of spelling skills. The present study tested the efficacy of an intervention to facilitate implicit learning of…

In this paper, we attempt to investigate the pedagogical value of visual social media platforms, specifically Instagram, for the development of the online social presence of language classes. Students in intermediate university-level French and Italian classes used Instagram for a six-week period to reply to a series of questions prompted by the…