Explicit Teaching of Syntactic Movement in Passive Sentences and Relative Clauses

• Main Authors: Volpato, Francesca, Bozzolan, Giulia
• Format: Article
• Language: deu
• Published: Edizioni Ca’ Foscari 2017-09-01
• Series: Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie Occidentale
• Subjects: Bilingualism. Explicit syntactic teaching. Passive sentences. Relative clauses.
• Online Access: http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/riviste/annali-di-ca-foscari-serie-occidentale/2017/1/explicit-teaching-of-syntactic-movement-in-passive/

This study presents a language learning approach involving the explicit teaching of syntactic movement to a sequential bilingual (Romanian-Italian) child aged 7;4, who was exposed to Italian at the age of 3. The child was assessed on her general skills in Italian and on production and comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) and passive sentences (PSs). Her performance was assessed before and after the teaching period. At the first administration, she had low results in all tests compared to monolingual Italian children. After the period of explicit teaching, improvement was observed especially in PSs. In the use of RCs, improvement was less evident, especially in production, but it is worth noticing that metalinguistic awareness was developed.