The use of reflective tasks, such as journals, as a means to enhance learning is not uncommon in higher education. However, the formative value of reflective tasks is not easily reconciled in tertiary settings where assessment requirements traditionally favour product over process. While learner perception and resolution of this tension have…

This article describes the experience of integrating a class blog into an advanced Italian course, in order to provide an out-of-class forum for language practice and for sharing course-related ideas and information. It also reports on an evaluation of the blog's effectiveness, drawing on an analysis of the students' blog contributions and their…

This chapter presents the results of a study on interlanguage variation. The production of four L2 learners of Italian, tested four times at yearly intervals while engaged in four oral tasks, is compared to that of two native speakers, and analysed with quantitative CAF measures. Thus, time, task type, nativeness, as well as group vs. individual…

This study provides new evidence concerning the pattern of acquisition of free and bound morphemes in Italian, based on the speech of 59 children recorded through a cross-sectional method. We found that inflectional morphology is mastered before free-standing morphology. Despite the great variety of verb inflections, the analyses showed that…

This article looks at the linguistic landscape in two Northern Italian cities: Milan and Udine. Signs in two streets of a similar length were recorded and classified according to the language or languages they were written in. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence in the linguistic landscape of the different languages making up the…

Scholarly books with "identity" and "culture" in the title have loomed large on academic publishing lists for several years. Scholarly books with "Sinatra" in the title are a more recent phenomenon. Despite his six-decade career as the Voice (the 1940s), the Chairman of the Board (the 50s and 60s), and Ol' Blue Eyes (the 70s through his death, in…

The Italian demonstrative pronouns "questo/a" ("this[subscript [mas/fem]]") and "quello/a" ("that[subscript [mas/fem]]") implicitly convey information about objects' distance with respect to the speaker. Our study investigated the referents of "questo/a" ("this[subscript [mas/fem]]") and "quello/a" ("that[subscript [mas/fem]]") by analysing their…

This study assesses the extent of phonetic continuity between babble and words in four Italian children followed longitudinally from 0;9 or 0;10 to 2;0--two with relatively rapid and two with slower lexical growth. Prelinguistic phonetic characteristics, including both (a) consistent use of specific consonants and (b) age of onset and extent of…

"Promoting public understanding" is what the programming mandate asks the Swiss public broadcasting company SRG SSR to do. From a sociolinguistic perspective, this means linking speech communities with other speech communities, both between and within the German-, French-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking parts of Switzerland. In the…

The present article addresses the following question: what variables condition syntactic transfer? Evidence is provided in support of the position that third language (L3) transfer is selective, whereby, at least under certain conditions, it is driven by the typological proximity of the target L3 measured against the other previously acquired…

This paper investigates native speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) interaction in the workplace in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Based on empirical data from a 10-month email exchange between a medium-sized British company and a small-sized Italian company, the general aim of this study is to explore the nature of the intercultural…

The study is aimed at identifying hemispheric language dominance in both the right-handed and left-handed participants. Eighteen right-handed and 18 left-handed young volunteers were invited to listen for 80 times to a 720 ms duration Italian word. Signals from 16 electrodes were averaged and displayed both as traces and maps. When the word was…

The present study investigates lexical inter- and intralingual influences in the oral production of 14 very advanced learners of French L3. Lexical deviances are divided into two main categories: formal influence and meaning-based influence. The results show that, as predicted with respect to advanced learners, meaning-based influence is the most…

This paper illustrates the research design (including the pilot study) of a work-in-progress study aimed at examining the potential of bilingual podcasts for the vocabulary acquisition in Italian as an L3 in the Austrian school context for beginning learners. The longitudinal study tries to link findings of the Lexical Approach (Lewis, 1993, 1997)…

A number of recent studies have argued that bilingual children's language comprehension and production may be affected by cross-linguistic influence. The overall aim of this study was to investigate whether the ability to judge the grammaticality of a construction in one language is affected by knowledge of the corresponding construction in the…