This edited collection presents a selection of contributions made to the 13th eLearning Symposium, held at the University of Southampton, in January 2020. Our theme was 'Education 4.0 revolution: transformative approaches to language teaching and learning, assessment, and campus design', and attendees engaged in rich discussions around the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the validation of the Organizational Justice Index (OJI) by Hoy and Tarter (2004), a self-report questionnaire for teachers' perceptions of fairness in the operation and administration of schools. Design/methodology/approach: In two studies the authors validated the Italian version of the OJI.…

Keeping abreast of new technologies and the opportunities they offer is a challenge for inservice teachers (Blake, 2008; Egbert, Akasha, Huff, & Lee, 2011; Hanson-Smith, 2006; Hubbard, 2007; Robb, 2006). An important aspect of teacher learning about the use of technology is the ability to identify the affordances of new tools and how they can…

Infants are adept at tracking statistical regularities to identify word boundaries in pause-free speech. However, researchers have questioned the relevance of statistical learning mechanisms to language acquisition, since previous studies have used simplified artificial languages that ignore the variability of real language input. The experiments…

Eye-trackers are becoming increasingly widespread as a tool to investigate second language (L2) acquisition. Unfortunately, clear standards for methodology--including font size, font type, and placement of interest areas--are not yet available. Although many researchers stress the need for ecological validity--that is, the simulation of natural…

We use insights and methods from ethnomethodological conversation analysis and discursive psychology to develop an account of embodied word and grammar searches as socially distributed planning practices. These practices, which were produced by three intermediate learners of Italian as a Foreign Language (IFL), occurred massively in natural data…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…

The effects of warning on false recognition and associated subjective experience of false recollection and familiarity were investigated in 7-to 13-year-old children and young adults (N = 259) using the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Two warning conditions (warning with an example of a critical lure and warning without an example of a…

The early relationship between children's emerging articulatory abilities and their capacity to process speech input was investigated, following recent studies with English-learning infants. Twenty-six monolingual Italian-learning infants were tested at 6 months (no consistent and stable use of consonants, or vocal motor schemes [VMS]) and at the…

This study examines the writing skills of students in grades 1 to 5 of an Italian-English two-way immersion program. Narrative writing samples were collected in both languages and scored for content, organization, grammar, mechanics, vocabulary, text length, and overall total score. The results show that writing skills improved as a function of…

This study investigated micro- and macrostructural text features, and the impact of language-specific skills, on the bilingual, persuasive writing of 41 high school students learning English in Italy. Participants composed persuasive essays on 2 topics, each in Italian and English, and completed spelling and sentence generation tasks in both…

This paper focuses on community participation within the LIRA project--Lingua/Cultura Italiana in Rete per l'Apprendimento (Italian language and culture for online learning). LIRA is a multimedia repository of e-learning materials aiming at recovering, preserving and developing the linguistic, pragmatic and cultural competences of second and third…

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1). Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g. "The child ate the candies" following after "The child…

This article concerns a special learning space populated by Italians and Italian learners: the choir formed in Brisbane as a joint initiative between a community association and the Italian teaching staff at Griffith University. Our aim, in involving our students in the choir, was to bring them together with L1 speakers in an environment that…

This paper looks at how corpus data was used to design an Italian as an L2 language learning programme and how it was evaluated by students. The study focuses on the acquisition of Italian verb-noun collocations by Chinese native students attending a ten month long Italian language course before enrolling at an Italian university. It describes how…