Study abroad is laden with socially constructed expectations informed by discourses of place, people, and culture presented through social media, pop culture, word-of-mouth, and marketing. These discourses can shape how students approach and interpret their host countries and study abroad experiences. To better inform language and culture…

This paper describes the initial stages of a project which seeks to develop a language learning game for Italian running a deep linguistic grammar at its backend for fine-grained error detection. The grammar is designed within the grammatical framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). The project aims to bring together work from different…

This qualitative study explores challenges and benefits of introducing theater techniques into Higher Education (HE) undergraduate intermediate Italian language classrooms. Drawing on student surveys and reflective essays, the study offers original insights into how collaborative, performance-based activities can result in greater student…

The present dissertation intends to investigate the syntactic nature and L2-acquisition of passive sentence structure in two Romance varieties, Italian and Spanish. First, I will present an analytic proposal couched within the Generative Approach (Chomsky, 1957, and subsequent work); from there, and following Perlmutter and Postal's (1977)…

Providing foreign language students with opportunities to engage in meaningful and purposeful communication and culturally authentic interaction with peers and native speakers is critical to successful second language acquisition and the development of intercultural competence . This paper describes research that investigated how selected native…

The abrupt transition from face-to-face (F2F) to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic impacted students' learning experiences in many ways. This survey-based study investigated the perceptions of 117 university students enrolled in beginner, intermediate, and advanced foreign language courses (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) of their…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. In the Slovene Littoral, Slovene and Italian are official languages and thus they share equal status in public and private life. Learners in this region attend schools either with…

Previous studies provided evidence for a connection between language processing and language change. We add to these studies with an exploration of the influence of lexical-distributional properties of words in orthographic space, semantic space, and the mapping between orthographic and semantic space on the probability of lexical extinction.…

In this paper, I argue for increased intellectual security in higher education. For this, I recommend greater attention to foundational studies and, specifically in leadership programs, to Machiavelli's depiction of the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be. My perspective joins a growing body of administrative theory which…

The use of innovative language in education is a current and pressing issue in a digital landscape where knowledge and skills are acquired in much more complex and fragmented ways than in the past (Di Blas, 2016; Selvaggi, Sicignano, & Vollono, 2007). We are experiencing a lot of interest in flipped classrooms, interactive learning…

From early in life, infants synchronize with others on a physiological level, a process thought to underlie social connections and group cohesion. This synchronization is seen, for example, when their pupils dilate in response to observing another person with dilated pupils -- known as "pupillary contagion." There is mixed evidence on…

We investigated online early comprehension in Italian children aged 12 and 20 months, focusing on the role of morphosyntactic features (i.e., gender) carried by determiners in facilitating comprehension and anticipating upcoming words. A naturalistic eye-tracking procedure was employed, recording looking behaviours during a classical…

This article introduces the CELI corpus, a new learner corpus of written Italian consisting of ca. 600,000 tokens, evenly distributed among CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) proficiency levels B1, B2, C1 and C2. The collected texts derive from the language certification exams administered by the University for Foreigners…

Linguistic minority spaces tend to have a long history of language-ideological struggles that are often fought on the terrain of education, which is further complexified in the light of more recent migration. The northernmost Italian province of South Tyrol is such a space, in which German-language preschools are increasingly attended by children…

The aim of this study was to investigate, using an eye-tracking tool, the processes behind the exploration of written texts performed by deaf people with different language skills and different educational backgrounds. Our sample comprised 36 deaf participants (12 of whom use Italian sign language most of the time, 12 who use Italian only, and 12…