As increasingly more upper secondary schools mainstream bilingualism via an array of strategies, databases collecting students' appraisals of their bilingual experiences become invaluable for informing practice. This paper discusses how the ADiBE Interview Protocol was adapted to efficiently collect candid appraisals from 99 students attending a…

In this paper, we have reviewed and analyzed literature textbooks at the pre-university level, respectively in the high school. In this research, we have examined the way these texts are analyzed (the pedagogical apparatus as it is otherwise called). Such work is done considering the requirements of the latter to fulfill certain competencies…

In language and second language acquisition research, it is important to have a measure for tracking the proficiency level of participants. Lexical competence is fundamental for communicative purposes in a given language, and vocabulary tests are a reliable measure to assess lexical proficiency. That is why vocabulary tests have a central role in…

How quantifiers are represented in the human mind is still a topic of intense debate. Seminal studies have addressed the issue of how a subclass of quantifiers, that is, number words, is spatially coded displaying the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect; yet, none of these studies have explored the spatial representation…

In the last ten years, positive emotion in foreign language learning has been increasingly investigated in many research areas, including Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE). FLE has been defined as a positive emotion felt when an individual's psychological needs are met. This study investigates the relationship between perceived levels of Subjective…

Purpose: Both monolingual and bilingual children use learning constraints and heuristics to acquire new words from their environment. Overall, fast mapping abilities seem to be similar in both populations, but monolinguals rely more than bilinguals on the mutual exclusivity strategy. Our study probes the robustness of these results in a large…

The development of intercultural competence is a crucial part of foreign language (FL) education, yet it remains under-explored in teaching materials and teacher education. Transnational perspectives on FL teaching, and specifically literary texts on migration and exile, may help expand teaching beyond the traditional monocultural focus and…

This paper provides fresh insights on how PIs (Polarity Items) in non-veridical contexts (questions and conditionals) are represented in the grammar of multilingual learners of Catalan at different stages of development. It explores how this non-native grammatical system interacts with other previously acquired systems of negation and the implicit…

Reduced forms such as the pronoun "he" provide little information about their intended meaning compared to more elaborate descriptions such as "the lead singer of Coldplay." Listeners must therefore use contextual information to recover their meaning. Across languages, there appears to be a trade-off between the informativity…

The Scale of Physical and Verbal Aggressiveness has been an instrument widely used in the scientific literature to measure physical and verbal aggressiveness, both in children and adolescents as well as in parents. The original scale has shown adequate psychometric properties. However, the scale has not been previously validated in Spanish, and no…

The language of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by difficulties with pronouns. The underlying reasons for such difficulties are still unclear. This study is the first to test the abilities of children with ASD who speak Italian, a language in which overt subject pronouns are optional but verbs obligatorily…

Empathy is important for interpersonal communication, social emotion, and social cognitive abilities throughout the lifespan. This study examined the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Empathy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (EmQue-CA) in a sample of 472 Italian children and early adolescents aged 8-13 years.…

We investigated the role of socioeconomic status (SES) in the unfolding of vocabulary and text-comprehension skills in language minority bilingual children, who are educated exclusively in their L2. For comparison, a monolingual control group was also tested, consisting of children of the same age and schooling. We administered a synonyms task to…

Intercultural competence (IC) has been identified as a crucial outcome of world language education. The purpose of the study is to compare possible differences in IC development between face-to-face and asynchronous virtual modes of delivery that were taken as emergency measures early in the COVID-19 pandemic for a beginning Italian course with…

In countries with several official languages, language separation often remains a structural principle in institutional education. Co-located schools, in which two autonomously administered schools with different languages of instruction share a physical space, may challenge this separation. Such schools have existed for a long time, but…