Discusses the use of ethnic literature in the classroom. States that ethnic novelists provide insight into the conditions of their people that the historian would find difficult to document and discuss. Provides a list of books on the following ethnic groups: Afro-Americans, Jews, Norwegians, Italians, Slavs, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, and Irish.…

Addresses the principles underlying the merging of interlanguages in multiple-language acquisition. The article claims that there is an "interlanguage logic" in multiple- language acquisition and that one can see the structure of the basic learning strategy in interlanguage creation: "interlingual identification." (seven…

Reviews recent literature concerning what to do to help foreign learners of Italian develop communicative competence, i.e., a functional knowledge of the uses of the language. This literature shows that to be conceptually fluent in a language is to know how that language encodes concepts on the basis of metaphorical reasoning. (33 references) (CK)

The ideal computer-based foreign language reading program must include cognitive background, a learning taxonomy, sound computer design, and knowledge of what is needed for the specific language. Machiavelli's "Il demonia che prese moglie" is chosen for study due to its historical interest. (63 references) (CK)

Emphasizes the importance of pronunciation in the teaching of Italian as a second language and discusses a course in phonetics and phonology taught at the University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy. Common difficulties are highlighted, and lab exercises to overcome these difficulties are provided. (27 references) (CFM)

In September 1992, France opened 104 high school subject-area classes taught in English, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. The experience of the first year of these "European sections" is examined, and the implications for change in the French education system are considered. (MSE)

Explores role of discourse functions in children's use of "because" ("perche" in Italian). Disputes of 172 preschoolers were analyzed in terms of interactive move, argumentative strategies, and communicative acts. Results showed causal connective tends to co-occur with justification acts and may work as device introducing new information and…

Looks at naturalistic samples of adult-to-child speech to determine whether variations in the input are consistent with reported variations in the proportions of nouns and verbs in children's early vocabularies. Naturalistic speech samples from English-, Italian-, and Mandarin-speaking children and their caregivers were examined. (Author/JL)

Evaluated the effectiveness of Italia Oggi, a videodisc-based system for intermediate and advanced students of Italian at Griffith University in Australia. Attention was focused on students' behavior in pair work, including talk at the workstation and the collaborative strategies they employed. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the attitudes toward education of Italian immigrants, both parents and children, providing pre- and post-World War II views. Addresses the high school, which had not yet attained its status as a minimal credential for most occupations. (CMK)

Examines the way Italian-Canadian youth negotiate their identities through their language practices. Views identity as multiple and shifting and shows how eight Italian-Canadian youths in Toronto lean on different aspects of their identities through their daily linguistic and cultural practices across and within multiple worlds. (Author/VWL)

This paper describes a CALL approach which integrates software for speaker independent continuous speech recognition with embodied virtual agents and virtual worlds to create an immersive environment in which learners can converse in the target language in contextualised scenarios. The result is a self-access learning package: SPELL (Spoken…

This article explains the characteristics of three categories of Computer assisted language learning (CALL) programs that can be used in classrooms with conventional computer systems. The first category is dedicated programs, those in which the teacher cannot make any changes. The second is authoring programs in which teachers can insert their own…

This study assessed the ongoing development of digital libraries (DLs) on the World Wide Web. DLs of art and literature were surveyed for selected works from the early Italian Renaissance in order to gain insight into the current trends prevalent throughout the larger population of DLs. The following artists and authors were selected for study:…

A course in Italian literature is outlined for the advanced high-school and the third-year college level, using a thematic approach. The choice of theme in this case is the city, specifically Rome. (AM)