Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

Rivista | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale
Fascicolo | 51 | 2017
Articolo | Explicit Teaching of Syntactic Movement in Passive Sentences and Relative Clauses

Explicit Teaching of Syntactic Movement in Passive Sentences and Relative Clauses

The Case of a Romanian/Italian Sequential Bilingual Child

Abstract

This study presents a language learning approach involving the explicit teaching of syntactic movement to a sequential bilingual (Romanian-Italian) child aged 7;4, who was exposed to Italian at the age of 3. The child was assessed on her general skills in Italian and on production and comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) and passive sentences (PSs). Her performance was assessed before and after the teaching period. At the first administration, she had low results in all tests compared to monolingual Italian children. After the period of explicit teaching, improvement was observed especially in PSs. In the use of RCs, improvement was less evident, especially in production, but it is worth noticing that metalinguistic awareness was developed.


Open access | Peer reviewed

Presentato: 13 Marzo 2017 | Accettato: 19 Aprile 2017 | Pubblicato 28 Settembre 2017 | Lingua: en

Keywords Relative clauses • Bilingualism • Explicit syntactic teaching • Passive sentences

Copyright © 2017 Francesca Volpato, Giulia Bozzolan. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-1562/AnnOc-51-17-18