Camilla Bettoni

Linguistic purism and language shift: a guise-voice study of the Italian Community in Sydney

In Australia, besides English, the majority official language common to all Australians, there are numerous Aboriginal and Immigrant languages used regularly in daily life. Multilingual Australia is very proud of its rieh language resources. Yet the attempts at maintaining them produce little result, äs it seems common for minority languages to be abandoned once English is acquired, albeit with different patterns of language shift. In the case of Italian, the shift is rapid, much more rapid than some of its demographic characteristics would predict. In fact numerical strength, a long history of Immigration, and dense concentrations of population would favor maintenance rather than shift (see Giles et al. 1977: 312-315). In trying to establish some rank ordering of factors affecting language ecology in Australia, Clyne (1982) explains this apparent contradiction by demonstrating that, across languages, demographic and sociocultural factors intertwine differently, and that consequently some factors are poor predictors when considered in Isolation. Our general hypothesis here is that, in the case of Italian, the relative strength of demographic factors is weakened by the fact that very few, if any, Italians in Australia speak Standard Italian, that their cohesion is broken up into numerous dialects and regional or populär varieties, and that their attitudes toward these nonstandard varieties are mostly negative. The contribution of standardization to the vitality of a language varietyhasalready been noticed in the literature (see Giles and Ryan 1982: 5).

Pratica di lingua straniera: un'indagine empirica sulle attività extrascolastiche

As linguistic performance comes to share the limelight with linguistic competence in the fields of both Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Teaching Methodology, the interest for the learning strategies used by language learners is high, for both theoretical and practical reasons. This paper reports on the strategies used outside the classroom by a group of 418 Italian school and university students of English, German and French. Results, obtained by analysing answers to a detailed questionnaire, indicate that, although generally not frequent, overall functional practice increases with age and linguistic competence, is more widespread among girls than among boys, and slightly favours English over the other two languages. More particularly, language practice affects different strategies differently: it seems to favour more receptive activities, such as reading and watching TV, over more productive ones, such as speaking with native-speakers, and to reproduce outside the classroom activities more typical of the classroom, such as reading aloud, at the expence of more spontaneous ones, such as listening to the radio. This suggests that if the classroom were to offer a wider range of activities, students would have more varied models to chose from, and be prompted to using their L2 in their daily lives, as well as studying it.