Rooted in the decent education as a precursor to decent work, this study investigated via network analysis the relationship between the work as meaning inventory for university students (WAMI-U) (positive meaning, meaning-making through study, greater good motivations) and the humor styles questionnaire (HSQ) (health-promoting styles: affiliative…

Humor and fear appeals are widely employed in traditional communication for educational purposes, but their exploitation in animated pedagogical agents has been scarcely explored. We studied the use of humor and fear appeals by a three-dimensional animated pedagogical agent that taught the same procedural knowledge in four conditions: i) humor…

In the summer of 1950, teenagers Elvira Businelli and Delfina Tomassini embarked upon a teacher training course at the Italian university for foreigners, in Perugia, Italy--taught by Maria Montessori. Kn 2020, Elvira and Delfina, now in their 80s, spoke with Montessori Life in the interview presented in this article about their recollections of…

The present contribution focuses on Benigni's auteur film "La vita è bella" (Italy, 1997) as a tool for the development of language competence in L2 English, Spanish and German, as well as of translation skills from Italian into these languages. The project, developed at the CLASS Language Centre at the University for Foreigners of…

This article intends to show how situation comedies may be used in the English language classroom to develop awareness-raising activities aimed at soliciting an understanding of essentially pragmatic and cultural aspects of everyday language. After a brief overview of studies on pragmatic teachability (Rose and Kasper 2001, 2002) and learnability…

Martoglio's work is discussed in terms of the relationship of dialect literature and sociolinguistics in Sicilian culture. His ability to inform the speech of a character with the qualities of a particular code, somewhere between dialect and standard, is noted. (31 references) (Author/LB)