Explicit syntactic teaching of complex syntactic structures of Italian. A case study on a bilingual Arabic-Italian speaking girl with ADHD

Abstract

This study investigates the linguistic competence in the use of complex syntactic structures of Italian in a bilingual child (Arabic; Italian) aged 9;6 with ADHD. She was exposed to her second language (Italian) for the first time when she was 2;6. At home, she has always heard and talked Arabic and she has been exposed to Italian only at school. Moreover, due to ADHD, her attentional skills at school are very low and this does not help language improvement. When I first met her, her language was very poor and clearly worse than that of 4 monolingual Italian peers which were chosen as controls. Therefore, I submitted her, and the control group, to a standardized test (TROG-2, Bishop 2009) and to some non-standardized tests examining production and comprehension of passive clauses (Verin 2010), relative clauses (Volpato 2010), and production of clitic pronouns (Arosio et al. 2014). As expected, she showed very low performance compared to the other children. Consequently, I started to teach her these structures explicitly. In order to realize a tailor-made didactic intervention, I took inspiration from Levy & Friedmann (2009), Thompson et al. (2003), and from the Bambini disattenti e iperattivi, strategie di intervento a scuola manual as far as ADHD is concerned (Inattentive and hyperactive children, intervention strategies at school; Capodieci, Cornoldi 2013). After the explicit syntactic teaching sessions, the child was tested again and results showed that she had improved a lot in her linguistic skills in Italian.