EXPLICIT SYNTACTIC TREATMENT OF RELATIVE AND PASSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS: A CASE STUDY ON A SEQUENTIAL BILINGUAL ROMANIAN- AND ITALIAN-SPEAKING CHILD

Abstract

This dissertation deals with a case of explicit syntactic treatment on a bilingual child (Romanian – Italian) aged 7;4, who started being exposed to her second language a few months before her 3rd year. A bilingual situation such as this one is called sequential bilingualism and, despite being far from achieving a general agreement, some studies demonstrate that in these cases certain L2 structures could be either difficult to acquire or even avoided. I submitted therefore the child to some tests assessing her general competences in Italian, and then production and comprehension of relative clauses and passive sentences. Comparing her results with monolingual Italian peers and slightly younger children, she showed a performance below the mean as regards to some parts of the tests. After the testing session, a phase of explicit treatment of these structures has taken place. The activities took inspiration from Ebbels and van der Lely (2001), Ebbels (2007), and Levy and Friedman's (2009) syntactic treatment cases, even if new details have been added to meet the child's needs. After the treatment stage, which consisted in a 3-months-period of weekly 45-60 minutes-sessions, another testing session has verified whether or not the child had achieved any improvement. Explicit syntactic treatment is still today a not very much widespread technique. Moreover, no cases of treatment on a sequential bilingual child have ever been documented in any language.