Insegnare la Grammatica Italiana a Bambini Immigrati. Un esperimento sul Focus on Form nella Classe Multilingue

Abstract

The present study explores focus on form L2 teaching in Italian multilingual primary schools. The novelty of the study is that the treatment was delivered to three ‘intact’ 2nd grade classes, attended by native, near-native and non-native speakers of Italian, 68 children altogether, aged 7-8 years. However, the experiment targeted specifically 14 Chinese learners who still had problems with basic grammar in oral production after two or three years of schooling. It is clear that the content-based learning context did not provide an adequate input for their interlanguage development. It was therefore assumed that some attention to formal aspects of language was needed while that the communicative quality of interaction should be maintained. Data on the children’s interlanguage was collected for pre-, post- and delayed post-tests through oral elicitation tasks. The treatment addressed grammar features selected according to pre-test results analysed within the framework of Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998; Bettoni, Di Biase, in print), namely 3 persons of present indicative verbal inflection (category stage). The teaching was based on a proactive focus on form treatment (Doughty, Williams 1998): input flood, pushed output in essential tasks, corrective feedback. Statistical analysis shows a strong treatment effect for the experimental group on both post-test and delayed post-test; no effect was found for the control group (N. 9). The analysis of the children’s interlanguage shows a higher rate of learning for the 3rd plural morpheme versus 1st and 2nd singular. It is argued that, despite the fact it is learned later in naturalistic acquisition, the 3rd plural is easier to learn in an instructed context (due to syllabic ending, agglutination morphological construction, selection not depending on the interactional context). Qualitative analysis also shows a common developmental path for the experimental group. The study has strong pedagogical implications as it proves that short and regular sessions of Italian second language teaching based on focus on form are beneficial to migrant children interlanguage development and can effectively apply to the multilingual intact class