Fabiana Rosi

Confirming or asserting? Conflicting values and cross-linguistic influence in the use of yes/no particles in L2 Italian.

Yes and no allow an easy management of talk-in-interaction and, unlike other classes of discourse markers, occur from early stages of L2 acquisition onwards (Perdue 1993; Bernini 1996, 2000; Andorno 2008a for L2 Italian). However, problems in their use can arise in replies to negative utterances such as “Didn’t you hear the news?”, “You didn’t read the news, did you?”, as in this case speakers have to choose one of the two conflicting values possibly encoded by the particles — either asserting a positive/negative polarity for the proposition at issue or confirming/reversing the negative polarity conveyed by the previous speaker. Since Pope (1973), a distinction has been drawn between languages with polarity-oriented particles, such as English yes/no , and languages with agreement-oriented particles, such as Japanese hai / iie . The study compares the use of Italian si/no and other routines such as echo-constructions in native speakers and L2 learners with either a polarity-oriented or an agreement-oriented L1. Results show that cross-linguistic influence can affect the use of si/no in L2, as pointed for other domains of pragmatic competence (Gass & Selinker 1992; Kasper 1992; Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008). Results further show that, even when learners lack pragmalinguistic competence in the use of particles, they treat replies of confirmation or rejection differently, thus revealing sociopragmatic sensitivity similar to that of native speakers in recognising the markedness of disagreement replies.

Riflettere sulla grammatica a scuola: una ricerca sul soggetto

The paper discusses some preliminary results of the research project GRASS - Grammar Reflection at School: Syntactic Subject , which involved 444 junior and senior students from lower to higher education grades and 16 teachers. Starting from some general remarks on the current state of grammar teaching in the Italian school system, particularly critical as far as real speech, discourse and metalinguistic awareness are concerned, the paper highlights and discusses three main critical issues: a)the confusion between (con)textual reference and grammatical function, well attested by thediverse and incongruous ways used by the respondents to identify and represent the subject of sentences from a text; b) the pupils’ and students’ grammaticality judgements on verb and subject agreement, especially in cases of semantic/syntactic mismatch; c) the relation between the respondents’ explicit definitions of grammatical subject and the emerging underlying notions that characterize the different stages of Italian education as far as primary vs. secondary schools are concerned. Finally, some conclusions are drawn on the possible outcomes that this type of research can have in terms of teachers’ training and teaching practices.

IL PROCESSO DI PRODUZIONE SCRITTA: LA COESIONE VERBALE IN TESTI DI SCUOLA PRIMARIA

Una delle principali difficolta che incontrano i bambini della scuola primaria nella produzione scritta riguarda la coesione verbale, ovvero il mantenimento lungo il testo della dimensione temporale inizialmente selezionata per riportare gli eventi. L’articolo esamina questo specifico tipo di competenza testuale negli alunni di sei classi del secondo ciclo della scuola primaria, tre delle quali hanno partecipato alla sperimentazione educativa sulla produzione di testi scritti “Osservare l’interlingua”. Il confronto fra i dati raccolti all’inizio e alla fine dell’anno scolastico mostra una riduzione dei salti immotivati da un tempo verbale all’altro, definiti shift temporali, nei testi prodotti nelle classi del campione sperimentale in misura maggiore rispetto a quelle di controllo e sottolinea gli effetti positivi, a breve e lungo termine, di una didattica task-based condotta con approccio inclusivo, cooperativo ed attivo. The process of writing: verb cohesion in primary school texts One of principal difficulties in producing written texts for primary school pupils concerns verb cohesion, i.e. maintaining the temporal dimension initially chosen for expressing events throughout the text. The paper examines this specific textual competence in pupils from six classes within second cycle of primary school. Three of these classes were involved in the “Observing interlanguage” project focused on written production. The comparison of data collected at the beginning and the end of school year shows a decrease in temporal shifts (transitions from one verb tense to another) in the texts produced by the students involved in the project with regard to the control group. These findings highlight the positive effects, both short-term and long-term, of task-based teaching through an inclusive, cooperative and active approach.