The article discusses the interpersonal effects of cooperative goal structures in classrooms with a large number of immigration background students. A goal structure could be one of the relational patterns that supports the migrant pupils and their classmates to accomplish school-related goals. A cooperative goal structure emphasizes positive interdependence between classmates. The main purpose of the research-invention is to remove the interpersonal barriers and promote better peer relationships between migrant and non-migrant pupils. We measured the cooperative goal structures’ effects through two variables: a) collaborative interaction; b) relational structure. For the collaborative interaction, we observed a positive result. Upon the collaboration offered by migrant students, the analysis yielded a statistically significant effect: Wilks Lambda = .80, F (2, 68) = 4.43, p <.001. With regard to the received collaboration, the outcome was: Wilks Lambda = .73, F (2, 64) = 11.37, p <.0005. As to the second variable, the study showed the improvement of the mutual relationship between migrant and non-migrant students and the overall increase of social density index in the classrooms. The paper proposes a new direction of development: integrating different levels of schoolbooks linguistic complexity within cooperative goal structures . Two methods can facilitate the control of linguistic complexity: the computing of linguistic indexes and text-layering . Both methods can help educators to scaffold reading difficulty levels for diverse students.
Literacy is a complex notion that cannot be reduced to a dichotomy (literate / non-literate). In this paper we discuss the notion of literacy and we distinguish it from the Italian term alfabetizzazione , which is more based on schooling and reveals to be only partially reliable. We consider various national and international surveys which have been developed to measure the levels of literacy in world population so that results can be now compared and correlated with other development factors. The analysis of international surveys is the necessary milestone for increasing and improving educational policies in the world. In international surveys of this century, Italy has ranked among the states with the lowest literacy rates. It is, therefore, necessary to start from this framework and from the worrying persistence of adult functional illiterates in Italy to renew the commitment of the institutions in order to promote and increase literacy in our country.
Concerns about climate change have seen increased attention across virtually all media after 2000. In addition to raising ecological awareness, these concerns have inspired numerous gothic fictions, in which the polar thaw consequent on global warming becomes a source of paranoia, fear and horror. This article explores a specific group of twenty-first-century cultural products that associate polar melting with epidemics triggered by pathogens or infectious insects released after lying dormant in the ice. Often called “zombie” viruses or bacteria, these pathogens appear in a wide range of fictions as well as in sensational articles that use gothic paraphernalia to describe the spread of terrible diseases. Like spectres, these agents of contagion return from the past to haunt the present; they also cast a dark shadow upon the future, as they become the invisible protagonists of “dystopian ecological visions” in which humankind and other species are at risk of annihilation. Four types of products are analysed to demonstrate that they convey similar anxieties by combining images of environmental disaster with pandemics. Different though they are in genre and medium, novels like Thaw’s Hammer (2010), films like The Thaw (2009) and TV series like Fortitude (2015-18) not only interrogate the epistemological limits of science; they also shed light onto dangerous socioeconomic dynamics while posing ethical dilemmas about the human meddling with nature. Mostly produced before the spread of coronavirus, these fictions are made more appealing by the current pandemic, which has encouraged speculation over new potential sources of contagion. Their appeal is confirmed by the 2020 proliferation of newspaper/magazine articles focusing on “zombie” pathogens. By merging objectivity with sensationalism, these articles turn pathogens into spectral agents that seek revenge for human crimes against nature.
This chapter looks at the ideological positioning and argumentation patterning of three sets of interrelated data, which can be considered vertically organized in a hierarchical configuration: these sub-corpora consist of the drafts of a major International Trade Agreement, the TiSA, (Trade in Services Agreement), a series of revelations and exposures authored by WikiLeaks, and a collection of online publications produced by the campaigning group, Friends of the Earth International. The objective is to identify how a process of ‘entextualization’ is realized through the various discourses – from the normative codification of legislation, on to the detailed specialist exposition and critique from legal experts, and over to the affectively-charged discourse of resistance and protest in the public domain. The conceptual and explanatory frameworks for the analysis derive from two disciplinary fields, argumentative studies and discourse analysis, where the role of language studies in describing discursive construal has traditionally played rather different roles. The analysis of the corpus starts from a linguistic perspective, comparing and contrasting semantic profiling, topicalization, and verb usage over the three sub-corpora. Using accounts of argumentative structure and procedures – elaborating the notions of schema, frames, moves and strategies, it is possible to identify distinctive patterns of reasoning, revealed through linguistic indexicality. In this way, argumentation can be related to the three varying communicative contexts, their authorship, audiences and rhetorical purposes. This study is, therefore, an attempt to integrate the two fields of argumentation studies and discourse analysis more systematically, recognizing the mutual benefits this carries for both, providing a body of empirical evidence necessary to further theoretical models and theories of argumentation, on the one hand, while extending discourse analysis into more challenging areas of investigation and taking a wider textual perspective than has often been common to date.
This article offers an overview of the current situation of sign language interpreters operating in Italy, with reference to the wider European context. Although the profession is not yet formally recognized in Italy, it has gained more and more visibility in recent years thanks to TV broadcasting. However, the characteristics and working fields of sign language interpreters are still largely unknown to non-professionals. This article starts with a description of the main working language used by interpreters, namely Italian Sign Language (LIS), and of its main users (Deaf people), who can be considered a socio-cultural community. Then, the article provides an overview of the historical evolution of interpreters, focusing on training options and professional contexts. Particular emphasis is given to the current legislation concerning sign language interpreters at the national and international levels, with a focus on the national associations of interpreters.
This essay discusses an audience reception study carried out in the framework of media accessibility in order to evaluate the experience of blind/partially sighted patrons and their (sighted) accompanying persons in the context of Macerata Opera Festival (MOF), 2018 edition. Adopting a qualitative analytical approach, in which the main interest is on individuals (i.e. the samples under investigation), and relying on post-hoc self-report questionnaires, three interdependent variables were measured: (1) comprehension and recall , (2) cognitive load , and (3) psychological immersion . This analytical approach was then combined with a descriptive approach including the collection of attitudinal data for the evaluation of appreciation and preferences . Results reveal that there was no substantial divergence in the levels of the variables under investigation between the two samples: blind/partially sighted and sighted (accompanying) patrons. Additionally, audio description and tactile tours did not provoke cognitive overloading and they even increased psychological immersion. Furthermore, it is possible to find a correspondence between the high levels of appreciation and preferences and the results related to comprehension and recall, cognitive load, and psychological immersion. This confirms the effectiveness of audio descriptions and tactile tours in enhancing audience’s experience and increasing blind/partially sighted users’ empowerment.
In this paper we present the results of a survey, conducted in the Italian region of Lombardy, on teaching Italian as a second language to adult migrants at Pre A1 level of competence, i.e. in the case of semi-literate learners. The first purpose of this research was to describe the characteristics of the teaching practices of Italian as a second language in Pre A1 level courses for migrants, collecting data through a questionnaire addressed to teachers in adult education centres in Lombardy. Then, a broader objective was to encourage the teachers’ metacognitive thinking, in order to enhance and disseminate existing good practices and promote methodological innovation, with particular attention to the role of grammatical reflection in the case of semi-literate learners. After showing the theoretical framework and the methodology of the research, we analyse the collected data, which allow to outline some implications for teaching practice and teacher training.
The chapter focuses on a new ideological formulation introduced in 2018 in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. The contribution aims at studying the discursive strategy in which the item is embedded, and through which it is promoted, by analysing Chinese political discourse in a diachronic perspective between 2013 and 2019. Using a selection parameter of intertextuality, the author has compiled a corpus of texts (in the Chinese language) through which this multifaceted discursive strategy is constructed. Drawing on the discourse-historical approach (Reisigl, Wodak 2009, p. 89; Wodak 2001, pp. 65-66) in a critical discourse analysis perspective, the paper will show how the discursive strategy performs a synergic action to disseminate the new ideology formulation by addressing two sub-topics, and, in parallel, how the texts intentionally promote two main macro-topics of Chinese political discourse.
This article reads the television series Mr. Robot (created by Sam Esmail, 2015-2019, USA Network) as a hack of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet . Deriving the interpretative framework to analyze Mr. Robot from the series itself, the essay first explains the use of the notions of computer hacking and source code in the context of artistic adaptation, outlining how hacking can function as an extended conceptual metaphor which enables a fresh, unified understanding of both processes and products of adaptation and appropriation. The framework of hacking is then applied to an extensive comparative reading of Shakespearean source code and televisual hack which focuses on a tightly integrated complex of issues involving the heroes’ madness, audience manipulation, and narrative consistency. The central argument of this reading is that the updating, porting and forking of the source code of Hamlet performed by Mr Robot amounts to an interpretation as much as to a modification of Shakespeare’s play. Hamlet’s manipulation of the audience throws light on the technologically upgraded means of direct audience communication used in Mr. Robot . Mr. Robot ’s reinterpretation of the Ghost as both a part of the protagonist’s mind and a manifestation of his madness in turn suggests an intriguing new reading of Hamlet's madness, and its mode of storytelling enables a reassessment of the various inconsistencies of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Reassessing Mr. Robot and Hamlet in the context of artistic hacking affords new insight into both contemporary complex television series and early modern plays.
The present paper analyses multilingual practices in the primary schools of Bologna (Italy). More specifically, we investigate the linguistic repertoires of a sample of 78 students, as well as their self-assessments of their reading-writing skills. The analysis is based on a questionnaire administered in 11 highly multilingual classrooms, in which at least 60% of the students spoke more than one language. The results show that, on the one hand, Italian is indicated as part of the linguistic repertoire by almost all the interviewees; on the other hand, the majority of the students reported to have high-level reading-writing skills in Italian, regardless of the composition of their linguistic repertoire. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a writing task in Italian that we administered to a sub-sample of students, in order to verify the impact of multilingualism on writing skills through the comparison between the written production of multilingual and monolingual speakers.
This article discusses metaphors used in communication in English about COVID-19 in the light of the critical debate on war-related metaphors that has taken place both in the academia and in the press since the outbreak of the pandemic, as various scholars have argued that such metaphors may have counterproductive effects under various viewpoints. Proposals have also been put forward to replace them with alternative less potentially harmful metaphors (e.g. FOOTBALL, FIRE, STORM, TSUNAMI). In this paper the discussion is based on the analysis of a corpus of print and online news and opinion websites dealing with COVID-19, and aims at verifying the actual use and frequency of both war-based metaphors and non-war alternative metaphorical expressions. At the same time, it intends to evaluate the potential adverse effects of the former and the advantages of the latter as claimed by the scholars involved in the debate. It also shows that in articles and posts dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, WAR metaphors and their entailments are virtually still prevalent, indeed ubiquitous, while the alternative metaphors proposed by scholars appear far more sporadically, with only few instances for each of them or none at all. This high frequency of war-related metaphorical expressions, which is found also in various other domains and in spontaneous speech, mostly in recurrent (and therefore predictable) phraseological configurations, suggests that they have now become conventional and lost their resonance, thus reducing their potential impact.
This special issue on Experiencing Shakespeare in Digital Environments explores the new frontiers of textual and performative spaces opened up by digital media in Shakespeare Studies. Against the background of the ongoing scholarly debate, where the outcomes of digital culture and their far-reaching implications have been examined from a variety of perspectives, the volume identifies three main areas of investigation. The articles of the first section illustrate how increasingly interactive and cross-networked digital environments affect our ways of approaching Shakespeare’s textuality. They touch on a variety of topics that are gaining prominence in the debate, ranging from the digital turn in textual transmission and editorial mediation to the newly available tools and methodologies in source studies and Shakespeare pedagogy, with an eye to the specific cognitive, reading and learning abilities of digital natives. The second section investigates the changing notions of performance against the innovative modes of cross-mediality, trans-mediality, and inter-mediality. It dwells on how the remediation of theatre into the digital media circuit has not only problematized the concept of ‘liveness’ as an essential component of the medium itself but has implied the creation of hybrid products and all sorts of paratexts that need to be understood within new models of global and local communication. As the articles included in this section show, Shakespearean performances – whether they are produced and put on in traditional ‘centres’, like the Globe in London, or in the elsewheres of the world – are growingly broadcast through digital channels: they therefore constantly dialogue with each other thus assuming intercultural meanings that challenge established ways of interpreting and criticizing Shakespeare. The third section is concerned with a broad spectrum of ways in which digital technologies impact the performance, adaptation and transmission of Shakespeare’s works. Including discussions of Shakespeare DVDs, internet memes, televisual hacks, Virtual Reality (VR) installations and a live streaming broadcast from a prison, the contributions contemplate how the digital, in its myriad guises, permeates and updates both the production and reception of Shakespearean codes.
Based on Bernardo Soares’ Book of Disquiet , I will reflect on several issues that I consider central to this work by this semi-heteronymous person: the problem of referentiality; the sense of freedom he finds in the literary sphere; the dialogue (central to this semi-heteronomous person) between the biographical self and the fictional self, taking into account above all the possibilities of reading that they imply on this relationship; the way in which the narrator Bernardo Soares fixes the (re)constitution of a self in the “autobiography without facts” as he himself identifies his Book ; the deconstruction of the autobiographical; the daily complexion that ends up partially determining the process of representation of the Book - not identifiable, however, unilaterally with the indexed record of the empirical reality; its critical positioning in relation to a civilized context emptied of respect for each individual; the narrator's search for identity, which seeks to reconstruct himself through the aesthetic-literary vigor with which he constantly digresses on thematic nuclei initialed by anguish, skepticism, uneasiness, unrest; Bernardo Soares' position on literary writing as writing.
This paper discusses the digitally inflected changes occurring in Shakespeare source study – a long-standing research field that burst back into prominence over the last few years. The recent publication of volumes such as Shakespeare, Origins, and Originality (Holland 2015), Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study (Britton, Walter 2018) or Shakespeare’s Resources (Drakakis in press) vouches indeed for a steady resurgence of interest in “the circulation, transformation and function of Shakespeare’s sources” (Bigliazzi 2018, p. 13) – a rising tide heightened, no doubt, by the proliferation of electronic archives, digital critical editions, wiki databases, and corpus-based searching tools designed to bring early modern (inter)textuality into sharper focus. This “flood of digital possibilities” (Lavagnino 2014, p. 21) has greatly impacted on Shakespeare source criticism, modelling new ways to explore and identify the intertextual, subtextual, and contextual forms of influence that shaped the playwright’s production. In this essay, such an ongoing shift of perspectives is examined by sorting through a series of digital methodologies and resources that show promise in improving how we visualise, analyse, and identify Shakespeare’s diverse sources. Laying emphasis on the dovetailing of “‘old source study’ and more contemporary approaches to textual and cultural analysis” (Britton, Walter 2018, p. 1) fostered by the digital medium, the paper illustrates the benefits, limits, and prospects of digital editing and archiving, quantitative analyses, wiki databases, and digital thick mapping for the study of Shakespeare’s creative process and early modern European theatricality tout court .
This paper analyses gestures used among L2 speakers by presenting an interview of two Tamil native speakers which have moved to Italy for short periods of work in a mechanical multi-national company. The aim is to remark how gestures can improve foreign language speaking and can facilitate the comprehension among L2 speakers; and to highlight the necessity to consider culturally specific gestures when someone interacts with a foreign language speaker. The relevance of gestures in human thought and communication, the cognitive advantages in using gestures as a strategy for teaching languages, and the necessity to learn symbolic gestures to get an intercultural competence will emerge.
This paper deals with the topic of text simplification discussing two models of writing that make texts easier to read and understand. First, it briefly discusses plain language, which has been debated in Italy since the beginning of the 1990s as a tool to improve government communication. However, even though several initiatives tried to promote it, it is still little used, and it has not defeated bureaucratese. Second, this paper presents “Easy-to-Read”, a model of linguistic adaptation designed to write texts that are easy to read and understand for people with intellectual disabilities. Its features of conciseness and simplicity also make it suitable for other categories with reading difficulties due to psychological and neuropsychiatric conditions, social factors, and/or poor knowledge of a language. Plain language and Easy-to-Read share several traits, although Easy-to-Read is a more specific application designed for readers with special needs. Easy-to-Read is a relatively new concept: several guidelines have already been created for some languages, along with the European ones, designed during the Pathways project by the European association Inclusion Europe. Yet, the existing guidelines often lack extensive linguistic indications and can prove insufficient to write proper easy-to-read texts. After presenting Easy-to-Read, the paper will discuss some methodological issues, such as some problems regarding the existing guidelines for the Italian version of Easy-toRead; the complexity of the needs of its recipient; and the absence of proofs, as Easy-toRead currently lacks a more scientific approach and further studies are still needed. Finally, the paper briefly discusses the need to spread both plain language and Easy-toRead in order to foster the participation in social life of people with reading difficulties or intellectual disabilities and promote their right to information.
