Elvira Graziano

This study analyses the variety of the language used in textbooks for teaching Italian as a second/foreign language. These books use a language much closer to written than to spoken Italian and do not consider its varieties, providing examples and exercises with a “neutral” standard that speakers rarely use in everyday speech. The aim of this study is to provide a critical review of pronunciation sections in current L2 Italian textbooks, in the light of a renewed and growing interest in the study of the Italian language, not only by students with a migrant background in Italy, but also by second and third-generation emigrants who want to learn Italian to recover their roots. Thirty-two Italian textbooks were examined, considering some geolinguistic variables. The general tendency seems to be the introduction of some neo-standard Italian features. As far as the phonetic–phonological level is concerned, this is probably still insufficient because of the complexity of the Italian linguistic repertoire. Our analysis further suggests the inadequacy of notions such as (neo-)standard Italian for teaching purposes in the linguistic space of global Italian.

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is an essential factor of mother–infant interaction and facilitates early language processing and word learning during dyadic interactions. This study aimed to longitudinally investigate emotional and prosodic components of IDS in the first year of life by analyzing children’s responses to the different prosodic trends that mothers use during the observation of mother–child interactions. Seventeen mothers and infants were recruited for this study during their first hospitalization. The study involved observing communication changes in face-to-face interactions between the mother and child at three, six, and nine months after the child’s birth. We analyzed the relationship between gaze direction, smiling, speech speed, and clarity. The results showed that the IDS differs in production when compared to the age of the child; at only nine months, there is high intensity. The same is evident from the results related to the elocution velocity. The verbal sensitivity of the mother and the ability to tune in to the affective states of the child, especially at nine months, can predict the child’s understanding of future language.

The growing presence of students from migrant cultural backgrounds in Italian schools has changed classrooms, giving them a multicultural and intercultural aspect. This could mean a challenge for the concept of inclusion in educational contexts. This situation, very heterogeneous due to the various native places of foreign students, is often associated with the presence of learning difficulties. Recognising a possible learning disorder (Law no. 170/2010) in students from migrant cultural backgrounds is made more difficult by the lack of specific screening measures. This paper aims to present a preliminary report of a tool tested on a sample of Italian and foreign primary school children in order to evaluate their reading ability, regardless of the language they have as mother tongue. The tool is conceived as a preliminary screening in schools to understand if the difficulties of the students are related to the low L2 language proficiency or if they are the manifestation of other problems to be investigated through medical-diagnostic tests.