Sandro Caruana

The island of Malta offers an ideal setting to investigate the extent to which the linguistic input from the media may be significant in second language (L2) acquisition. Although Italian is not spoken in Malta, many individuals are exposed to this language via the media as Italian television programmes are popular on the island. In this article the extent to which Italian may be acquired via the media is discussed by taking into account research carried out among guided and spontaneous learners of Italian L2. Despite the unidirectional nature of television and the absence of the possibility to interact and negotiate so as to modify or simplify the L2 input, results show that L2 input from Italian television programmes in Malta may help to learn the language, even in the case of learners who have never undergone formal instruction in the L2. This, inevitably, has repercussions on the teaching of Italian as illustrated in the concluding section of this paper.

The very fact that Europe is becoming increasingly multicultural, and consequently also multilingual, leads to communication problems. ‘Foreigners’ are considered to be so because they have a different cultural background and because they behave differently, if not strangely, when compared to natives or locals. They are often excluded from the general urban network, forming their own network through associations and neighbourhoods. Language, as well as communication habits and practices, are one of the main resources through which people are included or excluded from a community. In this paper we focus our attention on conversations between individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds in urban institutions and how certain conversation techniques and procedures become conversation strategies through which a person is constructed as being-a-foreigner. These conversations, recorded in Malta and in Italy, were collected during the SPICES (Social Promotion of Intercultural Communication Expertise and Skills) project 224945-CP-1-2005-1-IT-GRUNDTVIG-G11. The data presented is useful to reveal aspects which are taken for granted during conversations and in order to discuss the relevance of intercultural education in today’s multicultural society.

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.