Online didactics: a boost for traditional didactics and linguistic research

Abstract

The present dissertation wants to deal with two main topics: online didactics and linguistic research. Recently, the interest in the first topic has consistently increased: the online teaching method as support of traditional teaching methodologies. The idea is to employ an online platform that offers a wider range of possibilities to teachers and especially to students, in order to facilitate the contact between the foreign language and the student himself. In this specific case of study, the use of an online platform for conversation practice with native speakers has been investigated. The platform, called TalkAbroad, is a key instrument employed by more than 500 universities in the USA which allows American students to speak Italian (and many other languages) with mother-tongue speakers living thousands of kilometres away. Students achieve grammatical skills in class, guided by the professor, and later on, they apply them during authentic online conversations with Italian L1 partners. Online didactics is not just a boost for traditional didactics, but for linguistic research too. This is the second topic this dissertation deals with. Several online platforms offer the advantage of recording video-conversations and keeping a memory of the didactic-path, for this reason they represent a major resource not only for students and professors but also for linguists. Being a member of the TalkAbroad community and working there as a speaking partner, I had the possibility to investigate the most common mistakes made by American-English L1 speakers while learning Italian as a foreign language. The study included fifty 30-minutes conversations, between one American student and one Italian partner at a time. All the conversations have been analysed and classified according to the student gender, language level, and types of mistakes. This process allowed the identification of both major and minor mistakes done by American-English speakers learning Italian as a foreign language. Subsequently, each mistake was categorized in one of the three following language spheres: morphology, syntax, or semantics. The results obtained from this research functioned as a guideline for the creation of four intensive learning units (UdA) for English L1 speakers having an Italian A2 level. The first UdA focuses on article inflection, the second on the agreement between qualitative adjective and noun, the third on the agreement between subject and participio passato, the forth is about verbal inflection in the presente, imperfetto and futuro tense.