The aim of the Regional Dossier series is to provide concise descriptions of regional or minority languages in education, mainly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. Friulian is a Romance language, traditionally recognised as part of the Rhaeto-Romance sub-family. It is spoken in Friûl (in Friulian)/Friuli (in Italian), a territory…

German university degrees, at least in some countries, offer students only German literature courses in addition to language courses. Linguistics is often not a core component of German degree programmes. As a result, students who are not familiar with basic linguistic terminology do not know how languages work, including their mother tongue, or…

The present study investigates whether exposure to multilingual pedagogies enhances emergent bilingual children's narrative abilities. These abilities are among the most reliable indicators of children's literacy skills. We compare two groups of emergent bilingual children with migrant background attending the fourth and fifth grade of a public…

The present contribution aims at describing the main phases of implementation of a Transformative Action-Research project named 'L'AltRoparlante'. This project began in school year 2016/2017 and is still being implemented in five Italian multilingual schools. Its main purpose is to acknowledge students' individual and collective multilingual…

According to a language-integrated view of spelling development, learning to spell involves the same language-learning skills across alphabetic systems. A prediction based on this view is that the same spelling training should be equally effective for learning to spell in a shallow (Italian, native language) or an opaque (English, additional…

This paper will present a translation project with second-year bachelor students together with some observational data. The students firstly translated an academic abstract from Italian (their first language) to English by using the language resources they were acquainted with. Then they translated a second abstract by using a pre-compiled offline…

Students and teachers from different language backgrounds are at risk of becoming victims of conflicting trends and conventions when writing in English. This study compares conventions of English academic writing at several European universities with what is taught in English-speaking countries. Data were collected with questionnaires and by…

With increasing mobility of people across the world, there is a pressing need to develop evidence-based teaching practices that lead to high-quality education, which serves the needs of inclusive societies and social and epistemic justice. This book presents cutting-edge qualitative case-study research across a range of educational contexts,…

Wall Street English has built online activities that allow students to record phrases and receive word-level Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) driven pronunciation feedback. Students in language centres in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Italy (N=2,867) used ASR-Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) activities, and some (N=482) completed a…

Migration has become an important phenomenon in the contemporary world. In receiving countries, language policies have been put into place to offer migrants education in the national language, in order to give them tools to communicate with and to create a feeling of belonging to the local community. These policies claim to be integration…

This article describes a small in-class study which sought to explore the effectiveness (or not) of using the emerging bilingual skills of the students as a teaching and learning tool in a geography through English Content-Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classroom in Northern Italy. In particular, the study sought to examine whether and to…

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of Data-Driven Learning (DDL) teaching materials based on learner corpus data. The data analysed is made up of texts written by a group of Italian university students and collected as part of the Italian component of the "Longitudinal Database of Learner English" (LONGDALE) project:…

Reading in the second language (L2) allows learners access to new vocabulary and opportunities to translate from the L2 to the first language (L1) and vice versa. In this paper, we describe three studies that explored strategies for developing L2 Italian decoding repertoires. Participants were undergraduate students preparing for a short-term…

This study responds to the Italian Ministry of Education mandate that, starting the 2013-2014 academic year, CLIL be implemented in the "final" year of high school, during content time, by content teachers with C1-level competence in English. This decision raises numerous concerns, at least in Calabria: most content teachers have, at…

The present study was developed to assess teachers' beliefs on (1) the role of prior language knowledge in language learning; (2) the perceived usefulness of language knowledge in modern society; and (3) the teaching practices to be used with multilingual students. Subjects were 176 secondary schoolteachers working in Italy (N = 103), Austria (N =…