Balancing teaching national, regional, and foreign languages presents a challenge for higher education, illustrated by the use of hypertext for multilingual communication. This study investigates the correlation between proficiency in multilingualism and cultural awareness among higher education students. Embedded mixed methods design explores the…

Concordance-based Data-Driven Learning (DDL) aims to help second language learners infer language usage rules from language usage regularities. A number of DDL pedagogical treatments have focussed on phraseological units such as collocations, widely recognised as a central component of second language learning. This study evaluates DDL effects…

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…

This article discusses a community engagement pilot program for language students offered at Flinders University. For a number of years, the "Language in Action" program has provided placement opportunities for language students in a range of community settings such as aged-care agencies and cultural associations. From an educational…

In this study, we present the results of an original experimental protocol designed to assess the performance in a pluralization task of 52 Italian children divided into two groups: 24 children with developmental dyslexia (mean age 10.0 years old) and 28 typically developing children (mean age 9.11 years old). Our task, inspired by Berko's Wug…

Intercultural language learning and teaching is generally endorsed in contemporary foreign and second language classroom contexts. This article reports the use of an intercultural education activity taught in an Italian L2 elementary course at the Language Centre of the University of Bologna attended by exchange and degree-seeking students. The…

The aim of this study was to compare linguistic and narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual preschoolers and to estimate linguistic predictors of the macro-structural level of narratives. A battery of linguistic measures in Italian was administered to sixty-four Monolinguals and sixty-four Early Bilinguals; it included Vocabulary,…

Research over the past 2 decades has demonstrated that infants are equipped with remarkable computational abilities that allow them to find words in continuous speech. Infants can encode information about the transitional probability (TP) between syllables to segment words from artificial and natural languages. As previous research has tested…

While L2 production is widely understood to show traces of L1 interference and general cue availability, the role of visual cue strength on L2 production is previously unstudied. As such, this experiment compares the production of 10 L2 Italian speakers' intervocalic /p/ - /pp/ and /k/ - /kk/ contrasts, to see if the more visible labial pair is…

This study investigates the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies by native speakers of Slovenian (L1) who are advanced learners of Italian as a second language (L2), compared with monolingual Italian speakers. Using a self-paced reading task, we compare sensitivity of the early-acquired L2 learners to syntactic anomalies in their L2…

'Web-based and Interactive Italian' is a detailed and progressive programme developed by the author for the Maastricht University Language Centre. The course started in 2013, with the intention of catering for the variability in the number of students following the regular courses, as well as broadening the language offer using blended learning.…

This case study reflects on how Performative Foreign Language and Culture Education: (1) encourages students to be in charge of their learning processes through embodiment; (2) fosters community, sense of belonging, and the disruption of hierarchical norms by unleashing the power of discomfort; (3) brings to light the issue of assessment as a…

Emoticons play a key role in digital written interactions. Since the 1980s research has highlighted their growing relevance, as they allow to convey increasingly rich emotional, social, and pragmatic information. This article contributes to this area of research by providing an analysis of emoticons as structural markers in Twitter interactions.…

The present study looks into the effects of early multilingual education by investigating linguistic knowledge and metalinguistic awareness in young learners at the primary level. The study aims to establish whether children in multilingual education programmes perform higher on a measure of metalinguistic awareness and with regards to their L1…

Due to globalisation and migration, multilingualism has become both a reality and an aim of education systems across Europe, affecting how language education is shaped. To improve the ways in which schools cater for language education in diverse settings, research is required on the potentials of multilingualism in order to design curricula that…