2.1 Italian as primary interest

A number of studies in this category have sought to trace the acquisition or development of features of the Italian language, mostly its morphosyntax. In fact, there has been very little interest in the acquisition of Italian vocabulary since the year 2000. However, there has been at least one investigation into the extent to which learners make progress with the acquisition of Italian collocations. Bonci (Reference Bonci2002) specifically focused on grammatical collocations with esempio ‘an example’ (fare un esempio, dare un esempio ‘to make or give an example’) among three groups of students of Italian at the end of year 1, year 2 and year 4 at a British university. Using cloze, brief translation and essays, she found that grammatical and lexical collocations did not appear to follow the same pattern of development. Grammatical collocations (e.g. fare un esempio) improved noticeably from year 1 to year 2. In contrast, lexical collocations were more resistant to progress. Even students in year 4 (after a period of study abroad) found it difficult to be sensitive to lexical collocational patterns. Bonci argued for the use of concordances through which students might start to view vocabulary as a meaningful set of interrelated meanings rather than a list of isolated items.

There are still relativelty few studies that have investigated what it is about the Italian morphosyntax that may cause learners to acquire it differently, or to demonstrate classroom behavioural patterns that might be different from other languages. Of course these studies of developmental patterns do not necessarily have to show a ‘difference’ from other languages to be interesting; similarities can also be illuminating. What is at issue is that the research is about aspects of the target language itself and, as I have said, these are not numerous. This is to be regretted as there are many features of Italian in particular and as a Romance language in general that make it worthy of the subject of applied linguistics study. For example, it is well documented in the linguistics literature that Italian is a pro-drop language and that subject pronouns are only used for emphasis. Consequently, Italian verbs are highly marked in order to convey person and number as well as gender. However, as Pigato (Reference Pigato2005) points out, there are additional salient/non-salient features which add to the difficulty for the Italian language learner (auxiliaries, è ‘he/she is’ ho ‘I have’, ha ‘he/she has’ and the preposition a ‘to’ being less salient than auxiliaries sono ‘1st person singular verb ‘to be'’, siamo ‘1st person plural verb ‘to be’, abbiamo ‘1st person plural verb ‘to have’, and the preposition di ‘of’) and that free morphemes may be acquired earlier (or at least utilized correctly earlier) than bound morphemes.

So the fact that Italian is a highly inflected languageFootnote ³ is of interest both for developing acquisition theory and for its pedagogical implications. It is additionally important because of recent developments permitting comparisons of child L1 Italian acquisition, adult uninstructed L2 Italian acquisition, and instructed L2 Italian acquisition. Comparisons of these three populations are important because, inter alia, they help us understand which ‘base form’ of a grammatical tense learners begin by using, and this in turn helps us to make informed decisions with regard to teaching. For example, in descriptive grammar books, the base form of a verb is the infinitive. However, both child L1 Italian acquisition and adult uninstructed L2 Italian acquisition studies have shown that the 3rd person singular is the first form acquired and the form which is most often over-extended to other persons. If this were to be the case in instructed contexts, then for teachers to start with the infinitive as the base form would not make theoretical sense.

As Rodgers (Reference Rodgers2007) quite rightly observes in the case of the development of Italian verbal morphology, although there has been some research with the first two types of (above) populations of Italian learners/acquirers, there is virtually none with the third. He therefore addresses this gap in his study of 85 undergraduates at a US university (English L1). Focusing specifically on the emergence of the present indicative and on the development of automaticity, he presented them with a series of three tasks (picture identification task, picture description task and primed lexical decision task) in order to see what patterns of verbal inflection they were developing. He found clear evidence that 1st person singular (io-form) was the base/unmarked/preferred form of the beginner learners, in other words, the first correct form to emerge. He also found that singular verb forms were identified more easily than plural verb forms and that his participants frequently over-extended tu-forms to lui/lei-forms. What he did not find was that the first form to emerge was the infinitive (e.g. mangiare ‘to eat’). This finding may be due to the pro-drop nature of Italian – it would possibly be easier for learners of French to produce *Je manger than for Italian learners to produce *Io mangiare since they would so rarely hear the pronoun in the input.

The relative markedness of Italian led Pigato (Reference Pigato2005) to focus on students’ incertezze [uncertainties, in the productions of verb phrases] as characterized by pauses, fillers, lengthenings, confirmation checks, and truncations (apocopations). After analysing a corpus of nine lessons from beginner-intensive and advanced university language centre classrooms, she found that complexity (as defined by markedness) had a profound influence on the incertezze regardless of proficiency. However, lower-proficiency students made fewer verb-phrase errors because they restricted themselves (or were being restricted by the teacher) to less complex formulations. When looking specifically at the effect of markedness on verb phrase production, she observed that they were characterized by fragmentation; that is, pauses, fillers and lengthenings were all present. However, the most frequent and noticeable fragmentation type was truncations – ‘a sudden stop’ either just before or in the middle of the verb ending. In many cases the student fluently provided the correct root of the verb and then hesitated or stopped completely before the ending. An additional interesting finding was that beginners used far more subject pronouns, not (apparently) because they thought Italian required it, but because it helped to work out (or possibly rehearse) the verb endings during productions.

Unlike studies of markedness, which could be considered to be a very Italian-specific phenomenon, the study of the development of tense and aspect has exercised the minds of researchers working with Romance languages in general. This is because for English learners of Romance languages there are form–function relationship problems to overcome. Melucci (Reference Melucci2007) produced her research within this tradition, thus focusing on Italian L2 learners – a population hitherto not investigated for their development of aspect. She pointed out that Italian textbooks only make the perfective/imperfective distinction by referring to the English phrase ‘used to’ as a mark of the imperfective. She provided an example from a Harry Potter translation where the English ‘air rushed through his hair and his robes whipped out behind him’ (where the surface form is the simple past) is transformed into il vento gli scompigliava i capelli a gli sfilava di dosso gli abiti ‘the wind was ruffling his hair and was slipping the clothes from his back’ – where the surface form matches the function of continuous unfinished action. Melucci's study supported the ‘aspect hypothesis’Footnote ⁴ in that her college-level students were more likely to choose the right tense form when the passato prossimo [recent past/perfective] was required than when the obligatory context demanded an imperfective. In other words, as with French, correct application of the imperfect appears to be acquired later than correct application of the passato prossimo. In this sense, we can consider Melucci's study to be directly tracing the acquisition of Italian grammar, further confirming through psycholinguistics its categorization among Romance languages.

A final study that can be considered within this section is by Di Biase & Kawaguchi (Reference Di Biase and Kawaguchi2002) who tested Pienemann's (Reference Pienemann1998) processability theory against two typologically very different languages, Italian and Japanese (whereas hitherto the theory had only been tested using L2 German). Focusing on four morphosyntactic structures (topic-object agreement, noun-phrase agreement, -to for the marking of the past tense of verbs and -i plural marking on nouns), they studied six English learners of Italian (cross-sectionally at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels) and found that for all six learners the implicational nature of Pienemann's theory pertained. Although with a very small sample (and, crucially, not longitudinal), these results add weight to the idea that certain developmental sequences do exist as universal features of SLA.

2.2 Italian as a vehicle for SLA

In this sub-section we examine studies that have used Italian in order to test a theory that is not necessarily specific to Italian; in other words, they test psycholinguistic theory in general. The first of these is broadly concerned with whether innate faculties are still operating in adult SLA.

Sorace & Filiaci (Reference Sorace and Filiaci2006) were interested in the theory that there may be an indeterminacy or optionality, even in near-native speakers of an L2, an optionality not present in native speakers. More importantly, they wanted to investigate what might account for that phenomenon. They tested two possible explanations: 1) optionality results from the fact that knowledge representations in near-native speakers have been underspecified, and 2) near-native speakers have insufficient processing resources to be able to deal with the multiple types of information involved in highly complex and potentially ambiguous (as a result of the presence of L1) sentences. The researchers therefore presented near-native speakers of Italian (with English L1) with a set of complex sentences consisting of a main clause and a subordinate clause, in which the subject pronoun of the subordinate clause could ‘ambiguously’ (in English) coreferential with either the subject or the object of the main clause (e.g. il portiere saluta il postino mentre lui apre la porta ‘the porter greets the postman as he opens the door’). The subordinate clause either preceded the main clause (backward anaphora) or came after it (forward anaphora). Participants had to match the sentence against one of three possible pictures. The near-native speakers’ performance was compared to the performance of native speakers of Italian. Although differences were found between the two groups, the interpretation placed on the results by the researchers was that the near-native speakers may not have had the necessary processing resources to ‘integrate multiple sources of information consistently’ (p. 361). In other words, the difference with native speakers was due to insufficient processing power to deploy a (position of antecedent) strategy rather than them not having acquired the necessary null-subject grammar of Italian.

A similar testing of innate faculties was carried out by Miličević (Reference Miličević, Roberts, Gurel, Tatar and Marti2007) in relation to the theory of full transfer/full access, which claims that when an adult learner begins to learn an L2 they transfer all their L1 grammar to the task of understanding the L2. When this strategy fails, they resort to Universal Grammar options to restructure their understanding of the L2 grammar. Miličević tested whether this theory was as ‘monolithic’ as is claimed by investigating the L2 acquisition of Italian reflexive and reciprocal constructions (e.g. Maria si veste ‘Maria dresses/is getting dressed’ and Maria e Anna parlano spesso l'una dell'altra ‘Maria and Anna often talk to one another’, respectively) and by comparing the competence of Serbian and English L1 participants. She found that the English group was more influenced by L1 transfer than the Serbian group. Different types of transfer were identified for morphology (direct transfer of L1 marking) and argument structure (indirect influence of L1) and, as the theory predicts, innate UG mechanisms were detected on argument structure. However, the input was also found to be a factor, suggesting that the linguistic environment and not only properties resident in either the L1 or the L2 were driving the current interlanguage of the learners.

Another two inter-related theories which have been addressed via the study of the acquisition of the Italian language are cross-linguistic influence (how L1 knowledge can influence L2 production) and typological proximity (when languages are perceived by learners to be close to one another, or distant from one another, also known as ‘language distance’). De Angelis (Reference De Angelis2005) analysed the transfer of function words by multilinguals who were studying Italian as an L3 and in some cases as an L4. In addition, she specifically focused on the (inappropriate) insertion of overt subjects in Italian as the target language by analysing the written productions of a number of multilingual combination groups. In order to understand my summary of her results, recall that French and English have obligatory subjects (and in this respect are typologically close), and Spanish and Italian have non-obligatory subjects. In the case of subject insertions De Angelis found that the English L1 + French L2 group used more (inappropriate) subject insertions than the English L1 + Spanish L2 group. Thus, the L1 and L2 appeared to confirm one another or, put differently, the L2 dominated over the L1 influence. The Spanish L1 + English L2 group used fewer subject insertions than the Spanish L1 + English L2 + French L2 group. In other words, one L2 (French) appeared to dominate.

A possible explanation for these results might be that when two L2s were suggesting subject insertion, this influence ‘overrode’ the L1 which itself should not have been influencing a subject insertion. One of the limitations of this study is that, as far as I can see, there was no Spanish L1 + French L2 group which would have provided additional information about the effect of typological proximity in multilinguals. Typological proximity, as we have seen, also featured in the study by Di Biase & Kawaguchi (Reference Di Biase and Kawaguchi2002) in terms of Italian being used as a vehicle for testing hypotheses.

Attention is a construct that has aroused a great deal of interest in SLA researchers. The importance of isolating and understanding this construct lies in the fact that all L2 learners are constantly presented with huge amounts of data (L2 input) which they have to deal with. Selective attention or focused attention therefore is a mechanism by which learners may isolate certain features of the input and bring some cognitive processing to bear on it (noticing) such that it will result in some sort of uptake. One issue is whether a teacher should be directing their attention or whether learners have it within their own resources to do so. Gass, Svetics & Lemelin (Reference Gass, Svetics and Lemelin2003) used Italian as a tool for testing this theory by examining object pronouns and complex question formations (e.g. Per chi ha detto Jack che voleva comprare i biglietti? ‘Who did Jack say he wanted to buy tickets for?’) and comparing these to the learning of concrete vocabulary (surprisingly ‘new vocabulary’ for university-level students, e.g. forno ‘oven’ and contorni ‘side-dishes’). Drawing on another theory, that abstract/complex rules are more difficult to learn explicitly than concrete and simple rules, Gass et al. compared a group that was encouraged to focus attention on the new elements with a group that was not encouraged to so do. They found that both groups made significant advances in learning but that the focused-attention group learnt more. Contrary to their predictions, most learning in the focused-attention group occurred in complex syntax rather than relatively straightforward vocabulary learning. Moreover, higher-proficiency students benefited less from having their attention directed to the specific elements than lower-proficiency students. Gass et al.'s findings suggest that complex rules are amenable to being taught explicitly (contrary to theoretical claims). However, their study only measured immediate learning and this may explain the surprising results to some extent.

Virtually any language could have been used to test the theories in the Gass et al. (Reference Gass, Svetics and Lemelin2003) study. Italian simply appears to have been a language offered in the researchers’ institution. However, only a language where determiners are affected by number and gender could have been used in the study by Williams & Lovatt (Reference Williams and Lovatt2003). They investigated whether phonological short-term memory is implicated in the ability to learn new and complex rules, specifically morpheme sequences or combinations. In this study, Italian was being learnt as an experimental language, that is the participants were not already learners of Italian. Thus, an additional independent variable was whether or not the participants’ previous experience of learning a language affected their learning of Italian determiners. Using a series of tests (including an ‘input memory test’ where nouns and determiners, e.g. delle scarpe ‘some shoes’, were presented together in sets of three and contextualized), the researchers found that input memory correlated with participants’ ability to generalize to new combinations of determiners and nouns. Very importantly (recalling the De Angelis Reference De Angelis2005 study described above), language background and ability to generalize correlated strongly, suggesting that participants were using some kind of transferring strategies.

Although in a very different area, Italian has also been used as a tool for examining two controversial areas: test validity and the claimed advantages, in educational terms, of being a community language speaker as opposed to being a foreign language learner. In a study by Elder (Reference Elder and Kunnan2002) these two groups were labelled Background Speaker (BS) and Non-Background Speaker (NBS), and Italian was one of a number of languages examined in a larger Australian project which included Greek and Chinese. Elder sought to investigate the belief that BS testees in Italian had an advantage over NBSs and that this advantage might favour their entry into higher education (a foreign language being a requirement). She examined test results in the Australian language certificate (a formative test of beginning proficiency in years 8 and 9) and the Victorian Certificate of Education (a summative exam used in entrance requirements for higher education at around year 12). She found that the earlier exam did indeed favour the BS in that they not only performed significantly better, but test item bias was found in a considerable percentage of items. However, these items reflected real language competence (knowledge of food; household objects and expressions of time, as well as the skill of listening) rather than some other external advantage that the NBS could not have access to. The later exam only marginally favoured the BS and only for those students for whom standard Italian (and not a dialect) was the home language and who, in any case, used it regularly at home. She therefore concluded that there was little evidence to show that NBSs were being disadvantaged. Nevertheless, she proposed two useful safeguards: that measures used to assess performance should ensure that they tap into the differing strengths of both BS and NBS, and that test designers and policy makers should ‘separate the measures used to assess school achievement from those used for university selection’ (Elder Reference Elder and Kunnan2002: 97).

In summary, we find that Italian has been studied for its own sake (i.e. where findings can be directly related to pedagogical implications), and indirectly, as a vehicle for testing theories and constructs. The level of indirectness is also a variable in that one can draw some implications for the teaching and learning of Italian from some studies more easily than from others. What is noticeable about the studies in the section we have just examined is that they virtually all used learner-external measurements of Italian acquisition or development. Even though some authors argue that their research questions might be more effectively answered by learner-internal measurements (e.g. Gass et al. (Reference Gass, Svetics and Lemelin2003) propose that stimulated recall or introspection might illuminate the issue of focused attention), there appears to be a reluctance in these study types to move away from the pre-test–post-test design of competence or performance. In the next section, we turn to the small number of studies which have asked the learners what they do or what they think with respect to the learning of Italian.

4.1 Technology enhanced Italian language learning (TEILL)

Communication via established and emerging digital platforms clearly offers a number of possibilities to teachers and researchers of Italian alike. There are a number of research themes emerging from this body of research: the extent to which exchanges should be structured (by the teacher) or left free and unstructured; whether the use of electronic communication as a pedagogical tool might be intrusive; how much real L2 culture can actually be communicated via electronic formats; and whether more learning results from communication with one's (L2 learner's) peers or with native speakers. There is also the perennial question of interest to all computer assisted language learning (CALL) researchers of whether learners prefer face-to-face learning to distance with computer assisted learning

An interest in the level of structuring in electronic exchanges was a key feature of a study by Marden & Absalom (Reference Marden and Absalom2004), who carried out an analysis of e-mail exchanges in university learners of Italian in Australia. Eighty students participated in two cycles of one-to-one e-mail conversation. Marden and Absalom found that those messages which were less ‘elaborated’ and less structured from a stylistic point of view were associated with messages whose content was also quite trivial and superficial.

In the Marden & Absalom study, the communcation was between L2 learners of Italian. Tudini (Reference Tudini2004) used synchronous CMC between native speakers of Italian around the world and non-native speakers of Italian in Australia. What is at issue here is CMC itself as a pedagogical tool and whether synchronous CMC acts as ‘a bridge to [real] conversation’ (p. 63). Indeed, Tudini speculates on whether CMC can be classified as ‘Italiano parlato digitato’ [digital spoken Italian] (p. 64) and reviews research that suggests that learners imitate native speakers’ discourse during digitalized interaction more than during oral face-to-face interaction. Using the chatline C6, Ci Sei? (a play on words, ‘R U there?’), which offers the options of chatting one-to-one or in a group, she found that the former option provided opportunities for negotiation of meaning whereas group discussions offered opportunities for ‘immersion in colloquial and regional varieties of Italian’ (p. 78). She also reports a number of attempts by participants to simulate oral communication, for example, producing a written form which simulates the spoken form and the splitting of turns, only possible with synchronous CMC.

The perceptions and attitudes of learners of Italian towards web-enhanced learning was studied by Strambi (Reference Strambi2004) from a theoretical perspective which included multidimensional motivation, learning styles, locus of control and autonomy, and the integrativeness of face-to-face and web-based learning. Using a variety of student self-reports combined with observations, she concluded that, generally, Italian students perceived the learning environment as effective, enjoyable and reasonably well integrated. However, some concerns were expressed related to lack of computer access at home and that using web-based material at home can be time consuming. Lastly, there was some evidence that the novelty of using web-based learning wore off and that therefore it cannot be a complete substitute for face-to-face teaching and learning.

A different angle was taken on CMC in Tudini's (Reference Tudini2007) later study, where she explored how negotiation and intercultural learning occurred in web-based chat rooms between university learners of Italian and Italian native speakers. Situating the study in an intercultural competence framework, she initially offers evidence that classrooms cannot provide sufficient opportunities to develop intercultural competence and do not prepare students for residence abroad. Again using the chatline C6, twenty-seven learners of Italian were encouraged (in that the interaction was submitted for assessment) to interact with native speakers. She found that out of the 232 instances of negotiation recorded, approximately 35% centred on lexis, 35% on syntax and 15% on intercultural information. One of the difficulties that appears to arise from this data is making the lexical/intercultural distinction. One online discussion centres around the native speaker saying Nella mia città c'è anche il miracolo eucaristico ‘In my town there is also the miracle of the Eucharist’, which is coded as ‘intercultural’. However, it could be argued that the Eucharist is certainly not specific to Italian culture and, in any case, in the example given, the discussion centres around its lexical meaning rather than its cultural use. Similarly, the introductory molto lieto ‘delighted’ from a native speaker which is followed by an explanation by him/her that [it can be used] invece del solito piacere ‘instead of the usual “pleased to meet you”’, could simply be classified as lexical information. It is, of course, not surprising that the semantic–cultural borderline should be blurred in this way.

An exploration of e-learning's potential for teaching Italian culture was also carried out very recently at the University of Manchester (UK) by Gaspari & Polisca (Reference Gaspari and Polisca2009) using a pedagogical package called ‘CAMILLE’. The interesting thing about this package was that it was actually developed in consultation with students themselves who suggested the aspects of Italian culture they would like to know more about. A positive outcome is that they considered cultural knowledge to be a very important aspect of learning Italian.

A particularly recent phenomenon has been the use of mobile phones as pedagogical tools. Given the pervasive use of mobile phones by the younger generation, it seems to be almost a case of ‘if you can't beat them join them!’ For example, Kennedy & Levy (Reference Kennedy and Levy2008) attempted to exploit mobile phones as a learning tool by sending their ‘highly motivated’ third-year university students a total of 55 messages over a period of seven weeks (averaging at 1.3 message per day) and reported that the vast majority of students found the experience a positive one, with the most popular time for receiving them being between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., and amusing messages being the preferred message type. There were some negative aspects, however: there was very little follow-up by students in terms of learning and the messages did not give rise to discussion with other students. Finally, the majority of students ‘found the messages more intrusive than they had anticipated’ (p. 323).

The evidence for a preference for face-to-face versus online learning is neatly summarized in a paper by Absalom & Rizzi (Reference Absalom and Rizzi2008) although it is not ultimately the main focus of their study. They conclude (along with others) that there is still a marginal preference for face-to-face learning and that as yet there is no evidence for the superiority of either of the two pedagogical modes in terms of learning effectiveness. In their own study, they investigated the difference between online listening and online reading. Their sample of 14 students had weekly online tasks for six weeks – half the group dealing with the texts as listening texts, the other half as reading texts. They found, surprisingly, that the listening group used ‘deeper approaches’ to learning while the readers ‘remained tied to the text and were satisfied with inaccurate or inadequate answers’ (p. 62). However, the authors provide very little actual data as examples and it is therefore difficult to discern why this somewhat surprising result should be the case, or whether it is a product of online learning.

More clearly successful uses of TEILL are reported by Miceli & Kennedy (Reference Miceli and Kennedy2000), who investigated students’ conversation patterns at multimedia workstations using Italia Oggi, in which students were actively and co-operatively engaged in dialogue which was both task-focused and maintained ‘appropriate social interaction’ (p. 23).

The above review of TEILL might suggest that use of technology is widespread in the teaching of Italian in higher education. Rende (Reference Rende2004) argues that, on the contrary (at least in her teaching environment of North America), there is little use of CALL or TEILL in Italian departments, or their use is highly sporadic. She attributes this to the preference for grammar-led syllabuses, loyalty to the textbook, and insufficient funding to assist with the development of software. In her doctoral study, she compared three groups: one which used TEILL systematically, one which used e-mail communication sporadically and another, which did not use TEILL at all, although some use was made of a language laboratory. Surprisingly, she found that the group which used e-mail sporadically outperformed the other two groups in final examinations, with no advantage for TEILL being found against either of the other two groups. Similary, Christie (Reference Christie2001) carried out a longitudinal evaluation of learner experiences and attitudes towards web-based multi-media, this time in business Italian. The researcher used initial and final questionnaires with 14 college students together with observation of students working in pairs. Positive findings were that videos coupled with transcripts and glosses were helpful in increasing their comprehension and that it offered them direct exposure to Italian culture. Perhaps more importantly for the students, it was the convenience of the web-based system that was important, allowing them to catch up if they missed a class. Interestingly, from the data reported, the students did not necessarily stick to the task dictated by the software.

A more far-reaching objective of technology-enhanced Italian language learning has been to see if it brings about a transformation, not only in learning but in the actual structural relationship between the teacher, the learners and the institutional curriculum. Orsini-Jones & Jones (Reference Orsini-Jones and Jones2002) investigated knowledge sharing and knowledge construction via a virtual learning environment known as WebCT. The idea is that this kind of learning environment takes on a constructivist paradigm where ‘students are actively contributing to the construction of their own knowledge and competence’ (p. 114). The researchers, at the University of Coventry (UK), report that initial results were positive, so long as the integration of WebCT is introduced and maintained under the strict control of the Italian language teachers (which seems to contradict the objectives stated somewhat). Positive aspects reported were developing learner autonomy, reflecting on their own progress, and developing the skill of ‘written-oracy’ a new (or fifth) skill that CMC is currently bringing into the spotlight.

4.2 Other pedagogical practices

One area that seems to be attracting some attention in the general SLA literature is growing evidence that L2 learners do appear to be able to acquire native-like level of performance despite the fact that their learning begins post-Critical PeriodFootnote ⁵ (see Herschensohn Reference Herschensohn2007; Singleton Reference Singleton2007). Bracci & Filippone (Reference Bracci and Filippone2004) provided a case study focusing on the aptitude and motivation of an Albanian learner of Italian who reached native-like levels post-Critical Period. Moreover, this student appeared to have achieved a level indistinguishable from native speaker purely by watching Italian television and, judging by what the participant claimed, through extensive metalinguistic reflection. Caruana (Reference Caruana2006) also measured the implicit acquisition of Italian through his participants’ watching of Italian television. His participants were from Malta, where Italian, according to the author, has witnessed a considerable increase in popularity (following its distinct lack of popularity during the resistance to Fascism), thanks in large part to the availability of Italian television programmes. Caruana labels learning though television as ‘spontaneous acquisition’ and provides evidence that Maltese children arrive at secondary school already quite fluent in Italian (i.e. before they start to learn the language formally – Maltese and English being the official primary school languages). Investigating 14-year-old students he compared the oral productions of ‘guided’ (those who had only learnt the language in school) and spontaneous learners of Italian. He found that over half of the spontaneous learners could be considered to have a ‘well developed interlanguage’ (p. 165), two thirds were capable of providing an articulate narration in Italian, and the overall performance matched quite closely that of the guided learners. Caruana attributes this autodidactic and spontaneous learning in part to the typological proximity of Italian, Maltese and English.

I will now consider a group of studies which have explored much more explicit forms of pedagogy. However, most of these have investigated single aspects of the Italian rule system via a particular pedagogical approach rather than the impact on learning generally. Just as in the SLA literature generally, there appears to be a reluctance to set up one method or approach against another in order to provide insights into broad learning outcomes.

Following the work and theory-building of VanPatten (Reference VanPatten2004, for a review), Benati (Reference Benati2000, Reference Benati2001) studied the effects of ‘processing instruction’ on the Italian future tense, and the same author (Benati Reference Benati2004, Reference Benati, Kiely, Rea-Dickins, Woodfield and Clibbon2006) investigated the effects of processing instruction on Italian gender agreement in adjectives and the Italian subjunctive respectively. Benati (Reference Benati2000) describes processing instruction as ‘un tipo di grammatica comunicativa'[a type of communicative grammar] (p. 473). Space does not permit a thorough account of the theory behind processing instruction, but it basically maintains the following. Whilst recognizing the central role of comprehensible input in acquisition, it proposes that to comprehend the input is not sufficient for the acquisition of grammatical structures. Rather, the learner has to make a link between the meaning derived from the input and the form that the meaning takes in the utterance or sentence. Since a learner's tendency is to go for meaning first, the input has to be manipulated (or ‘structured’) by the teacher in order that the form–meaning connection can be made by the learner. Thus, in Benati (Reference Benati2000, Reference Benati2001), the input was manipulated in such a way (e.g. by removing temporal markers – domani ‘tomorrow’, l'anno prossimo ‘next year’) that the learner could only know that it referred to future action by noticing the future tense ending. In this study, three groups – Processing Instruction (PI), Explanation of Rules and Practice (ERP) and Communicative Only (CO) – were compared and tested on acquisition of the future tense both in discrete point tasks and in oral narrative. In post-tests, Benati found that PI outperformed the other two groups in one of the grammar tests and both PI and ERP outperformed CO in the other grammar test and the oral test but with no difference between PI and ERP.

One of the criticisms made of processing instruction is that it contains an explicit component to the process (usually information about a rule, given before the manipulated input treatment) and that it might be this component that is the active ingredient in the relative effectiveness of processing instruction. In Benati (Reference Benati2004), therefore, an alternative group was created, a Structured Input group (SI), that did not receive the explicit instruction component. Benati found that there was no difference between PI and SI in an interpretation task, nor in written and oral tasks but that both PI and SI outperformed a group that received only explicit information. One observation that can be made so far of Benati's studies is that relatively simple rules have been selected for the experimentation: the Italian future tense of regular verbs is relatively simple compared to, say, the passato prossimo, and the adjectives chosen in the 2004 study were limited to noun–adjective agreement (bello/bella ‘beautiful’) without the complication of grammatical number or irregular forms. It would be interesting to carry out the experiment with more complex irregular combinations (e.g. due finestre verdi ‘two green windows’, strutture lessico-grammaticali ‘lexico-grammatical structures’). In Benati (Reference Benati, Kiely, Rea-Dickins, Woodfield and Clibbon2006), only PI and ERP were matched against one another for the acquisition of the Italian subjunctive. This is, indeed, a more complex rule although, once again, the examples were limited to ‘doubt’ and ‘opinion’ rather than the whole gamut of obligatory subjunctives. Once again, in this study, the IP appeared to have some advantage over ERP in the interpretive test but not in a written production task. Both in the adjectives study and in the subjunctive study there was no delayed test to measure long-term learning.

The influence of Bill VanPatten's work can also be found in a comparison of the effectiveness of task-based versus traditional instruction at an intermediate level of Italian (Means Reference Means2006). This is a timely study because, as the author points out, most explorations of task-based learning have been at the micro-level with, for example, length of time allocated to planning and task complexity as the independent variables, and very little effort has been made to establish the general superiority of task-based approaches over other pedagogical practices. Mean's definition of traditional instruction is basically presentation–practice–use, a fairly form-focused version of communicative language teaching, rather than what we might expect, grammar-translation lessons. His conceptualization of his task-based treatment group is predominantly input-based with a strong link to ‘processing instruction’. This to me seems surprising as I would have thought that one of the defining features of true task-based approaches was that learners were encouraged not to ‘use the language of others’. Also surprising is the choice of the accuracy outcome variable: a very narrow focus on the Italian agreement of gender and number with nouns and adjectives (once again not usually a characteristic of task-based approaches). Nevertheless, this study is interesting because of its results: a marginal advantage for the task-based approach in terms of accuracy outcomes and a significant advantage for the task-based approach in terms of fluency.

Another group of studies has also examined the impact of pedagogy on learning Italian in these relatively narrow terms. For example, Di Biase (Reference Di Biase and Di Biase2002) investigated the effect of two independent variables (developmental readiness and teacher feedback) on the learning of noun-adjective agreement. However, this study had two features which distinguish it from other L2 Italian studies focusing on specific elements of grammar: it was set in primary schools (in Australia) and was longitudinal (30 months). In each of three primary schools, one class received negative feedback to learner error whereas the other did not. Learner progress and teacher interactional behaviour were monitored through videotapes. Di Biase found that the groups that received regular and focused negative feedback did move more consistently to the next developmental stage (from formulaic use, to lexical use, to phrasal use) than the comparison group. The author acknowledges that teacher variability of practice, as well as the long period in which the process of development was observed, could hold many confounding variables but concludes that the negative feedback was the most ‘striking difference’ (p. 110), and therefore the most consistent independent variable between the two groups.

We now come to a series of studies which are very heterogeneous in nature. As I have already intimated, no studies were found, during the time period of the brief, which examined the effectiveness of a coherent and comprehensive teaching approach against another. It could be argued that in fact these refer to a somewhat loose framework of guiding principles which are mediated by the teacher rather than a comprehensive method or language teaching.

One of the few authors to come close to examining a comprehensive pedagogy is Rodgers (Reference Rodgers2006), who traced how learners make progress in both content knowledge and form–function mappings when exposed to content-based instruction (CBI) in Italian. A rationale for the study was that, on the one hand, Canadian immersion programmes have observed a lack of progress with morphosyntax and, on the other, that some teachers and policy makers fear that teaching content via an L2 can lead to less content knowledge. Rodgers investigated both of these issues with non-major learners of Italian through the subject of geography at a US university, who received no formal grammar instruction. Targetting a fairly comprehensive list of morphosyntactic items (prepositions + contracted articles, noun–adjective agreement, aspect), he found that content knowledge more than doubled and linguistic forms increased significantly. Not surprisingly, noun–adjective agreement increased the most, followed by prepositions and finally by aspect, no doubt a feature of the geography-related input the learners were exposed to and the difficulty of the elements targetted in relation to one another. Rodgers argues that the findings are encouraging for proponents of CBI.

Another report which attempts to investigate the efficacy of a comprehensive teaching approach is by Savoia (Reference Savoia2000), who investigated whether both proficiency and appreciation of culture increases through participation in theatrical performance. Arguing that students very often do not come adequately prepared for literature study, the course involved a progressive build-up of activities: oral reading of texts, storytelling, role-play, writing original dialogues, adaptation of pre-existing narrative texts to the stage and performance, close reading and performance of dramatic texts, and preparation for a series of performances including producing detailed programme notes. Whilst this course was only informally evaluated by the author, it would seem evident that this is a radical departure from the more traditional teaching of Italian literature, which Savoia argues has been product-centred and teacher-led.

Although not precisely a study about the effectiveness of pedagogy, a survey on use of translation as a pedagogic activity in British and US university Italian departments was carried out by S. Laviosa (Reference Laviosa2000). Questionnaire returns (N = 38) suggest a divergence of practice in the two countries. Whereas in Britain translation was rarely used with beginners but used considerably at (an unspecified) above-beginner level (50%), in the USA it was used more at beginner level (62.5%) and much less at above-beginner level. Subsequent to the data analysis, Laviosa argued that translation has been conceptualized as being about rendering vocabulary and structures from one language to another, and has neglected the socio-cultural element that may need to be communicated via the translation. She provides an amusing and convincing example of the translated instructions on a packet of Buitoni lasagne showing that the English version differs from the Italian because it ‘caters’ for British tastes and attitudes.

Other researchers have experimented with lesser known pedagogical techniques. For example, Russo (Reference Russo2002) successfully explored the effects of using functional grammar in both English and L2 Italian classes, and Tamponi & Puntil (Reference Tamponi and Puntil2006) studied how combining cinema and literature as input sources enhances the acquisition of complex Italian structures. These latter authors found that the majority of students claimed to have learnt certain language structures to express specific meanings rather than to have acquired the grammar contained in the structures, probably due to their focus on meaning and getting the tasks completed.

There is a more clearly defined group of studies which, rather than exploring principles or approaches related to language learning, have investigated interventions into changing the learners’ strategic behaviour – that is, what learners do with their linguistic resources. For example, Miceli, Murray & Kennedy's (Reference Miceli, Murray, Kennedy, Bartlett, Bryer and Roebuck2004) intervention which involved ‘stimulated reflection’ (a form of metacognition) as a technique for promoting language learning, can be classified as a teacher providing opportunities for ‘learning how to learn’ rather than a method for teaching an aspect of the Italian language. They recorded the learner–learner interaction of advanced students of Italian and soon after used these as stimuli for reflection. Two aspects of this study seem of particular interest. The first is the reflection (‘the stepping back and mulling over’) focused not only on linguistic content but also on the nature and quality of the interaction (turn taking patterns, negotiaton of meaning). The second is the protocol of questions that the teacher/researcher used: ‘What's happening here?’, ‘What are you trying to say here?’ and perhaps most importantly ‘Is there anything here that might be useful to talk about?’ (p. 24). This would seem not only to stimulate metacognition but also lead the teacher to a better understanding of the student's potential problems. Miceli and her colleagues report success with this technique, with some learners even deciding on specific steps towards future action. They warn, however, of the danger of students reacting defensively towards this teacher ‘probing’. Similarly beneficial was Miceli & Murray's (Reference Miceli, Murray, Bartlett, Bryer and Roebuck2005) short strategy training programme with less advanced learners who, according to the authors, appeared to start Italian at university with little understanding of what learning a language entails.

By contrast, Conti's (Reference Conti2001, Reference Conti2004) year-long intervention study into writing strategies of university students of Italian in the UK took as its starting point the claim that grammatical feedback is always ineffective. Conti argued that previous writing feedback research has not endowed the learner with a responsibility for improving written accuracy. He therefore initiated a strategy training programme in order to see whether writers could be encouraged to use teacher feedback more effectively. Using an experimental group of 10 students ranging from lower to upper intermediate, he compared them to another group not receiving the strategy training. Pre-, post- and during-the-year measurements were taken of their writing and strategy use (using think-aloud procedures), and questionnaires were administered. Particularly innovative materials were an ‘Error Targeting Checklist’ (which encouraged students to target errors when editing the next essay and to evaluate and then document the strategy that helped them to notice the mistake) and an ‘Editing Strategies Reminder Sheet’. By the end of the training programme, the students made gains against the comparison group, in that they significantly reduced their number of errors (both lexical and grammatical) without prejudicing or reducing the quality of the content of their writing. The data showed that they did this largely by increasing the monitoring of their writing for familiar errors and that overall the number of errors that they self-corrected increased.