Developing young learners' language awareness is becoming an important educational goal in a rapidly globalised world characterised by linguistic and cultural diversity. Drawing upon previous research in the field, the article highlights the importance of promoting language diversity and nurturing language awareness from an early age. We present a…

The relationship between first and second language in early vocabulary acquisition in bilingual children is still debated in the literature. This study compared the expressive vocabulary of 39 equivalently low-SES two-year-old bilingual children from immigrant families with different heritage languages (Romanian vs. Nigerian English) and the same…

Devising a writing system, or graphisation, is a fundamental aspect of corpus planning that no language can take too lightly. This paper begins with a general introduction to graphisation and to Italian regional languages, followed by an analysis of the different orthographies in use so far or proposed for the main regional languages in Italy,…

This article investigates what kind of multilingual operations are carried out as migrant and transnational creative writers deploy in their fictions in Italian (often an acquired language) the languages which they hold in their personal repertoires. Exploring first the linguistic, political and cultural implications of what Algerian author, Amara…

Although Spanish and Italian voiced stops are similar in articulatory (place of articulation) and acoustic (prevoicing) terms, there are important contrasts associated with these sounds in each language that may affect second language (L2) learners' acquisition. Spanish maintains an allophonic alternation between word-initial voiced stops and…

This study investigated the predictions of two approaches to second language acquisition. According to the usage-based approach, learner knowledge results from the strengths and weaknesses of input-driven statistical learning. According to the learner-varieties approach, pragmatic communication principles and language-internal constraints play…

This paper investigates the conditions under which stakeholders in the higher education system in multilingual Switzerland link expectations of students' future economic to the development of human capital. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in a project focusing on mobile students crossing linguistic borders within Switzerland, I examine how…

This study explored Korean university students' beliefs and perspectives on different English varieties, and their transformation in learner perceptions with respect to English learning, diversity in the English language, and learning of different English varieties over the course of a semester. On two occasions, Korean university students (N =…

The study presented here is interested in understanding the ways in which social interaction in technology-mediated institutional settings is constrained and afforded by what Pennycook defines as "critical moments" in the educational experience. Drawing on Social Learning Analytics and on the concepts of heteroglossia, contingency and…

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…

Since Italy's unification in 1861, the establishment and diffusion of the standard Italian language at the expense of all other linguistic varieties has dominated language and education policy discourses. Today, as Italy has transformed from a country of mass "emigration" to a country of mass "immigration," the language…

How well can non-native length contrasts for vowels and for consonants be perceived and is one type more difficult than the other? Three listener groups (native Italian and German as well as advanced German learners of Italian) performed a speeded same-different task involving vocalic and consonantal length contrasts as well as segmental contrasts…

The use of digital tools like computers and tablets in institutional learning arenas give rise to forms of flexibility where time and space boundaries become diffuse. Online learning sites are understood as being crucial today, especially in large parts of the Global North, where anyone anywhere potentially can become a student and have access to…

In this paper, I investigate the phenomenon of morphological variability in the production of Italian determiners, descriptive adjectives, and direct object pronouns by adult English learners of Italian to determine whether morphological errors are the result of computational or representational difficulties. Second language acquisitionists do…

This article discusses the implications of "multicompetence" (Cook, 1991), defined as an individual's knowledge of more than one language, for language assessment. The growing psycholinguistic evidence highlighting variability in native speaker performance as a result of multicompetence is reviewed, evidence that further questions the validity of…