Antoinette Camilleri Grima

This article describes an initial analysis of the acquisition of Maltese as a foreign language by adult learners. It specifically looks at four verbal tense and aspect forms. Three intermediate-to-advanced level learners were asked to carry out a set of tasks, and the resulting data was compared to that produced by three adult native speakers of Maltese. The main finding was that on production tasks (unanalysed knowledge) the most commonly used tense/aspect by foreign learners is the ‘imperfett’ (unrestricted habitual aspect) which native speakers (NSs) use only half as much as the foreign learners (NNSs). On the other hand, native speakers use the ‘perfett’ (past tense) twice as much as the foreign users of Maltese. Another interesting finding is that on tasks that require analysed knowledge the main difference between NSs and NNSs was that the NNSs had greater difficulty with the progressive and the restricted habitual, but did not show significant variability with regard to the ‘perfett’ and ‘imperfett’. Thus, the results indicate that (i) there is a difference in the performance of NNSs in quantity rather than quality with regard to the ‘perfett’ and ‘imperfett’; and (ii) that on tasks requiring analysed knowledge NNSs have difficulty with regard to the progressive and restricted habitual forms.

For many years it had been considered axiomatic that in the foreign language classroom exposure to the target language should be emphasized, and that the learners’ native language should be banned. However, in recent years, the analysis of classroom discourse has unravelled some essential pedagogical functions of the learners’ native language in foreign language teaching (Macaro, 2009). In line with this, the term ‘translanguaging’ has been introduced in the international literature with reference to the drawing on all of the linguistic resources that one has in order to ‘make sense’ (Garcia, 2009), and to improve language learning processes and outcomes (Lewis, Jones & Baker, 2012). Taking a sociocultural discourse analysis approach, this contribution shows how Maltese learners of Italian and their teachers interact bilingually to fulfil pedagogical requirements such as the assimilation of grammar points, explaining new vocabulary items, and shifting from formal to informal language. We give examples of how the teacher guides the learners in interaction toward target language approximation.

This paper introduces learning spaces in two multilingual countries, Switzerland and Malta, with the aim to interpret space in terms of social practices related to teaching and learning. The visual study draws on schoolscape studies and the conceptualization of space in education. The comparative analysis of 913 photographs collected from two schools aims to bring to light the similarities and differences in the respective learning spaces. A comparative approach is taken in order to explore the strange in the familiar context and to prompt reflections about learning spaces. Further, based on the result of the visual study, this article discusses how schoolscape studies may prove to be a potentially useful pedagogical tool in teacher education.

This article discusses the implementation of the Common European Framework of Reference’s (CEFR) set of descriptors relating to ‘personal response to creative texts’ in the teaching of Maltese as a Foreign Language (MFL). The new volume of the CEFR’s Companion Volume, published in 2018, included a number of new descriptors, among which are those related to learners’ response to creative texts. As an initial application of this new set of descriptors to MFL, we created an intermedial video production involving poetry, music and dance, that brings to the fore issues of migration. The video stimulates a reflection on humanity’s collective history, and suggests the idea that we all are descendants of people who came from the sea. In addition to the highly motivational aspect of the task, it has helped us estimate the difficulty of such a task in the context of MFL. We also obtained some insight into the application of the relevant descriptors for this part of the MFL syllabus.