This study examines the extent to which the motivation of university students of Italian in Melbourne (Australia) is influenced by the visibility of a local Italian community. The research relies on data collected by open-ended questions and two Likert items from a survey study (n?=?74) as well as in-depth interviews (n?=?5). The findings show…

The aim of the paper is to present the results of a research project called 'Tell Me', conducted from October 2018 to March 2020. The project focused on Bengali children living in Venice, Italy, and aimed to describe (1) children's languages in the home environment and at school; (2) the quality and quantity of input they receive in every language…

Listening narrative comprehension is a complex process that requires the processing of explicit (i.e., information presented in the text) and implicit information (i.e., information inferable from the text) and involves several linguistic and cognitive skills. However, the specific role of these skills in children's comprehension remains unclear.…

Background: The regular practice of shared book reading (SBR) at home may play a key role in fostering the linguistic development of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, more evidence is needed of the benefits of home-based SBR interventions on the parents' conversational strategies and on the communicative and linguistic…

Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children's…

Collaboration among students in the course of learning plays an important role in developing communication skills. In particular, it helps for team building and brainstorming on solutions of complex problems. While an effective group organization is critical for the success of such collaborative learning, many instructors would make arbitrary…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Multilingualism is often associated with advantages for acquiring additional languages. Theoretical approaches explain these advantages by assuming a Common Underlying Proficiency or a Metalinguistic Awareness. At the State Europe School in Berlin, students from different language backgrounds receive instruction in German and a partner language…

The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. Friulian is a Romance language, traditionally recognised as part of the Rhaeto-Romance sub-family. It is spoken in Friûl (in Friulian)/Friuli (in Italian), a territory…

Research indicates that students frequently struggle to apply their knowledge of organic compounds' structural theory to understand the concepts related to resonance and learn to use curved arrows to write resonance structures. Educators have developed educational tools and methodologies to aid students in overcoming their learning difficulties.…

Swiss Vocational Education and Training (VET) is based on national legislation which was introduced in the 1930s and renewed in the 1960s (as well as in the 1970s and in 2002). At first, the goal of the national VET legislation was to further Vocational Education and Training in order to support small and medium enterprises; however, later, it…

The present paper investigates the acquisition of L3 Polish by L1 Italian university students of L2 Russian. The participants had never studied the L3 prior to the experiment, but took a meta-linguistically explicit course in Slavic Linguistics focussing on Polish/Russian contrastive grammar. The main research question is whether or not the…

Migration is a significant life event that usually triggers cross-cultural preparedness and the need for learning, even transformative learning. This exploratory study answers two research questions: How do Nigerian immigrants describe their preparedness for cross-cultural transition in Italy? What are the indications of transformative learning…

This study compared language minority bilingual (LMB) second graders with two groups of monolingual peers (with comparable low SES or with high SES) in a set of literacy skills (reading fluency, spelling, reading and oral comprehension) tested in the target school language (L2 for bilinguals). The aim was to disentangle the roles of bilingualism…

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as…