Francesca Festi

Prøveforelesning som holdes kl. 14.00-14.45 og disputas som holdes kl. 15.00-19.00 vil bli streamet fra Universitetet i Verona via Zoom:

https://univr.zoom.us/j/82764804401?pwd=WUVZaDNPbEFvbm5jSDFuMTVHc0Vkdz09

meeting ID: 827 6480 4401

Passcode: 441420 

Disputasen holdes samme dag kl. 15.00, hvor det vil være offentlig forsvar av avhandlingen:

«Reading Comprehension in L2 Italian: Connecting Psycholinguistic Research and Pedagogical Practice»

Populærvitenskapelig sammendrag av avhandlingen:

Language minority bilingual children (LMBC) are often found to encounter more obstacles during their educational experience. Consequently, they tend to obtain lower grades and face higher drop-out rates. Difficulties during reading comprehension and tasks that require higher linguistic competences are identified as one of the main factors affecting the pupil’s performances. Thus, the first goal of this dissertation is to investigate reading comprehension and its potential predictors to understand in more detail what skills and knowledge support monolingual and LMBC during this activity. Moreover, we aimed to explore how the two groups behave during on-line reading and processing of complex grammar structures in order to understand whether there were qualitative or quantitative differences between the two groups. Ultimately, the long-term goal of this study is to propose more inclusive teaching practices that can respond more effectively to the needs of multilingual classes.

Reading is a complex activity that requires the mastery and the control of several sub-skills, such as decoding and recognising words automatically, interpreting the syntactic relations between the constituents, and reconstructing the literal meaning of the sentences. Moreover, to achieve good comprehension of a written text, readers have to engage in other activities that will help them building the general meaning of the whole text and developing a critical opinion. At this stage of reading comprehension, they will also need to use effective strategies to extrapolate pieces of information which are not explicitly mentioned in the text.

Given these premises, in order to examine what skills determine more advanced reading comprehension abilities, we assessed a series of linguistic and non-linguistic skills, and we analysed their impact on reading comprehension. In particular, we considered general cognitive abilities, decoding skills, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar. Furthermore, we measured the pupils’ reading comprehension abilities in Italian using grade-appropriate standardised tests. The outcomes of this assessment showed that there is indeed a difference in performance between LMBC and monolingual students during reading comprehension, and the bilinguals achieved lower scores than their peers. When we consider the tests investigating the predictors of reading comprehension, the two groups showed homogeneous abilities in all domains with the exception of receptive vocabulary. As it is frequently found, in fact, the bilingual group displayed reduced vocabulary knowledge compared to the monolingual children. In addition, we wanted to explore what the most reliable predictors were during reading comprehension for the two groups. This analysis highlighted that bilinguals and monolinguals use different skills and knowledge during this task. More specifically, the monolinguals’ performance in reading comprehension is determined only by lexical knowledge whereas the bilingual group  also made use of their grammar knowledge, general cognitive abilities, and decoding speed abilities.

Since grammatical knowledge was found to be an important predictor of reading comprehension success for the bilingual group, in the second part of the study, we focused on investigating the syntactic processing abilities of the two groups. In particular, we wanted to verify whether there were differences between groups during processing and whether these differences were qualitative or quantitative. To do so, we administered three Self-Paced Reading Tasks (SPRT) in which we investigated how the students processed complex structures such as object relative clauses and the passive voice. These tasks aimed to answer the following research questions:

(i) how does morphological information facilitate the interpretation of sentences during processing?

(ii) how does the presence of pragmatically implausible situations influence processing?

(iii) how do semantic violations affect processing?

The results obtained from the analysis of the reading times showed that both groups followed similar processing patterns. However, when accuracy rates are considered, we found that the monolingual group tended to achieve significantly higher scores.

The fact that similar reading patterns did not match with similar accuracy rates seems to support the idea that non-native processing is quantitatively different from native processing. In other words, syntactic processing of complex structures would require greater cognitive effort for the bilingual group.

These results have also pedagogical implications because they highlight the importance of implementing teaching activities that support students in the development of a richer and more efficiently organised vocabulary and grammar knowledge. We tried to develop a teaching intervention aimed at developing the ability to use their grammatical skills in order to understand and produce meaningful language, instead of limiting language teaching to the presentation of a series of abstract rules to be practiced in formal exercises. Lastly, we also carried out a series of experimental activities that aimed to practice the ability to make inferences, a skill employed during global text-processing. All the didactic activities developed and tested during the intervention aimed to stimulate the students’ metalinguistic awareness and encourage peer-to-peer interactions.

Veiledere:

Hovedveileder: førsteamanuensis Serena Del Maso, Universitetet i Verona

Biveileder: professor Merete Brendeford Anderssen, UiT Norges arktiske universitet

Bedømmelseskomite:

Dr. Séverine Casalis, Professor, Université de Lille, France (førsteopponent)

Dr. Stéphanie Bellocchi, Associate Professor, Paul Valéry University, France (andreopponent)

Dr. Denis Delfitto, University of Verona, Italia.

professor Yulia Rodina, UiT Norges arktiske universitet