Abstract Alberto Manzi (1924–1997) was an Italian educator and TV personality who is mainly remembered for a television program, Non è mai troppo tardi (It’s never too late), designed to promote literacy among adults. Manzi also authored a number of literary works, most of which had educational goals. He remains an influential figure in the history of Italian education, celebrated for his dedication to rendering learning accessible to a wider audience through innovative means. In this paper I discuss Manzi’s contribution to education, contextualizing his work in the historical period in which it was carried out. I also hint briefly at his legacy and its relevance to the Maltese teacher-education context.

The recent influx of Italians in Malta is extraordinary insofar as numbers are concerned, to the extent that today they represent one of the the largest group of non-nationals in gainful occupation on the island. Their engagement within an Anglophone community broadens their linguistic repertoire and this can have long-term benefits, but they also have many opportunities to use their own language, both among other Italians and with the Maltese. In this contribution, based on data collected by means of an online questionnaire completed by 347 Italian nationals who reside, study or work in Malta, I investigate their language use, and I focus on how this is related to other variables including age, occupation, level of education and duration of stay. Results reveal that Italian is used widely, both through face-to-face interactions, social media and by accessing it via the media. Some also use their dialect/regional variety. Nevertheless, English is used extensively too, and could potentially represent a threat to Italian as a heritage language in the future.

The recent influx of Italians in Malta is extraordinary insofar as numbers are concerned, to the extent that today they represent one of the the largest group of non-nationals in gainful occupation on the island. Their engagement within an Anglophone community broadens their linguistic repertoire and this can have long-term benefits, but they also have many opportunities to use their own language, both among other Italians and with the Maltese. In this contribution, based on data collected by means of an online questionnaire completed by 347 Italian nationals who reside, study or work in Malta, I investigate their language use, and I focus on how this is related to other variables including age, occupation, level of education and duration of stay. Results reveal that Italian is used widely, both through face-to-face interactions, social media and by accessing it via the media. Some also use their dialect/regional variety. Nevertheless, English is used extensively too, and could potentially represent a threat to Italian as a heritage language in the future.

In order to investigate how the combination of experiences, relationships, activities and initiatives act in unison, facilitating inclusive processes on some occasions and creating obstacles to it on others, in this contribution on Italian migrant leaners in Malta we adopt a biopsychosocial perspective, inspired by the WHO’s ICF-CY anthropological model. We interviewed ten parents/guardians to obtain insights on personal and environmental factors that affect inclusion in Maltese Secondary schools. Our findings reveal that parents/guardians relate personality factors to successful inclusion (e.g. adaptability, entrepreneurship and sociability), as well as involvement in extra-curricular activities. The Maltese schooling context, a competitive approach to learning, traditional teaching methodologies and lack of support represent barriers to inclusion. The holistic model we adopt shows that to guarantee quality inclusive pedagogies initial teacher education and continuing professional development must be addressed. Maltese schools must build better bridges with families, embracing inclusive perspectives from an eco-systemic educational viewpoint.

The -ata derivational suffix is attested frequently in nominalisations in Italo-Romance languages and its functions related to ‘event/single instance’ nouns have been documented extensively. This affix with these functions is also present in the derivational morphology of Maltese, in which diachronic and synchronic developments of -ata nominalisations reflect the evolutionary paths of this language, characterised by contact. By investigating the etymology of verbal and nominal bases, this research provides a classification of forms which take the -ata suffix in Maltese to refer to events and single instances within them, through derivation involving contact with Italian, English and Sicilian base forms. -ata nominalisations resulting from etymologically Arabic bases will also be included in the classification.

Over the past decade, Malta has seen a steady increase in the amount of Italian nationals who work, study and reside on the island. This is a significant recent development in the contacts between Malta and Italy and represents another important milestone in the relationships between the two countries, rooted in language, history and culture. Today, Italians are practically present in every sector of Maltese society and their move to the island is mainly determined by employment opportunities in an Anglophone context which is geographically close to their homeland. Research on this migration has been carried out over the past years in order to investigate language issues, schooling and socialisation. In this paper I provide an overview of the main results obtained in these studies, while also reflecting on how they are relevant for future research on Italians in Malta. Una rassegna della ricerca sulla recente migrazione degli italiani a Malta Durante l’ultimo decennio, a Malta si è registrato un aumento considerevole di Italiani che lavorano, studiano e risiedono sull’isola. Si tratta di uno sviluppo significativo dei contatti tra Malta e l’Italia e rappresenta un’altra tappa fondamentale nelle relazioni tra i due Paesi, le quali hanno radici linguistiche, storiche e culturali. Oggi gli Italiani sono presenti in praticamente tutti i settori della società maltese e, nella maggior parte dei casi, il loro trasferimento è determinato da opportunità lavorative in un contesto anglofono vicino al loro Paese. Argomenti linguistici, la scuola e la socializzazione sono tra i temi che sono stati investigati nelle ricerche svolte recentemente in merito a questa migrazione. In questo lavoro si propone una rassegna dei risultati principali e si riflette sulla rilevanza di queste conclusioni per studi futuri sugli Italiani a Malta.

Scientific literature has tackled Maltese English (MaltE) mainly in the framework of World Englishes in order to focus on its features compared to other varieties of English around the world. In this paper we shed more light on MaltE by proposing a sociolinguistic perspective, oriented towards its social stratification, and by referring to it through degrees of linguistic competence in English. We therefore propose two continua of variation: MaltE as an L2 continuum and as a situational one. Within this framework, we identify two groups defined as Mainly Maltese Speakers (MMS) and Mainly English Speakers (MES). We suggest that MaltE can be interpreted both as an L2, and as a variety used according to speech events, domain, participants, in-groupness etc. To investigate this we carried out a perceptual experiment involving two groups of university students, specialising in Maltese and English respectively. We discuss the results based on ratings and evaluations of authentic MaltE written and spoken prompts.

La demografia delle isole maltesi è cambiata recentemente, con l’arrivo di molte persone di nazionalità diverse, compresi italiani che formano un gruppo numeroso ed eterogeneo. L’inclusione degli italiani a Malta è favorita dalle affinità culturali tra i due paesi, e vivere e lavorare in una comunità dove si parla inglese viene considerata un vantaggio. Ci sono molti legami tra Malta e l’Italia che hanno portato a degli scambi commerciali ed economici regolari, positivi per ambedue i paesi. Tuttavia, come accade soventemente quando ci si trasferisce dal proprio paese nativo ad un altro, ci sono anche delle difficoltà. In questo lavoro, dopo aver fornito una descrizione del trasferimento recente di italiani a Malta, mi focalizzo sulla scuola come microcosmo della società per presentare sfide e opportunità in questo contesto come una riflessione di quello più ampio. The inclusion of Italians in Maltese society and schools The demography of the Maltese islands has changed significantly recently, with an influx of persons of different nationalities, where Italians form a large, heterogenous group. The inclusion of Italians in Malta is favored by cultural affinities between the two countries, who live and work in a community where English is widely spoken, which is also considered advantageous. There are several ties between Malta and Italy which have led to steady economic and commercial exchanges that are mutually beneficial. Nevertheless, as occurs commonly when one leaves one’s homeland to settle in another place, a number of difficulties are encountered. In this paper, after presenting a general overview regarding Italians who have moved to Malta recently, I focus on schools as a microcosm of society, to present the challenges and opportunities, as a reflection of the wider context.

Valuing diversity is one of the main goals of language education. This is both related to the education of learners of different nationalities and to the reasons for which languages are learned today, often determined by the need for social integration and to find employment. Language competences gain value through multilingualism, together with opportunities for intercultural communication. At the same time, language policies should be evaluated and renewed constantly. These issues are discussed in this volume, through contributions which take different languages into consideration and which are based on varied theoretical and conceptual frameworks, while pertaining to the fields of Applied Linguistics and Language Education.

Traditional media, such as television and cinema, provide rich audiovisual input that is conducive to language acquisition, as research in the field has shown. This includes contexts where learner-viewers are exposed to a foreign language without subtitles, as well as when exposure occurs using subtitles in their different modalities-interlingual and intralingual. The aim of this review article is to source information from different contexts to explore the extent to which incidental foreign language acquisition occurs through input, identifying how specific linguistic competences benefit from it. The main questions that will be addressed regard age and cognateness, when exposure to foreign audiovisual input occurs both in the absence and in the presence of foreign language learning. Some brief considerations will be forwarded in relation to the impact of dubbing and of recent technological developments on language acquisition.

[rec. di] E. Corino, C. Marello, “Italiano di stranieri. I corpora VALICO e VINCA”, Perugia, Guerra, 2017; E. Corino, C. Onesti (a c. di), “Italiano di apprendenti. Studi a partire da VALICO e VINCA”, Perugia, Guerra, 2018

Cultural notions are part and parcel of the process of Italian teaching and learning in Malta, a country with several historical, geographical and social contacts with the Belpaese. In fact, teachers of Italian in Malta are more familiar with Italy’s culture with respect to foreign counterparts, and they are generally highly interested in it. Nevertheless, a number of constraints lead to situations where the teaching of culture is heavily characterised by transmission and memorisation of information, rather than on learning intercultural competence as a lifelong skill. This study provides an investigation into these issues and formulates an outline of a didactic initiative designed purposely to promote intercultural education in the classroom of Italian in Malta.

Although Maltese is genetically a Semitic language, several technical terms, including those used within EU institutions, are integrated or non-integrated loanwords of Italian or English origin. Contact is also evident in the morphology of Maltese, and concatenative structures are productive through analogical processes, often based on Italian affixes. The description of the Maltese language version of EU documentation, as well as corpus-based considerations of the language variety used in EU directives (corpus A) and legal notices (corpus B), provides insights into this variety that relies heavily on Romance words, although others of Arabic origin are registered widely too. Loanwords from English are also present, albeit in limited numbers. Overall, no major differences emerge between the two corpora, and one cannot conclude that Maltese Eurolect constitutes a variety in its own right.

Pragmatics is rarely included in teacher-training courses. It is therefore worth investigating whether student-teachers of an L2 are familiar with it, especially when the pragmatic features under question are L2-specific. In this paper, we present results from an investigation on 15 Maltese future teachers of Italian who, despite being exposed regularly to Italian, did not attend any courses specifically on Italian pragmatics. Data regarding the production of requests and complaints were collected via role-plays (RP) and discourse completion tasks (DCTs) and were evaluated by native speakers. Results show that, despite an overall positive performance, subjects displayed a certain lack of sensitivity towards contextual variables and that RPs were rated lower than DCTs. Enhancing pragmatic awareness can thus be seen as an essential aspect of language education.