French dissertation: an argumentative genre between rhetoric and logic (evidences, assumptions and paradigm shifts)

Traditional dissertation has been practised by several generations of students. This exercise has also been commented on by several generations of school system experts. Between commentaries of teachers (before 1980) and those of didacticians (after 1980), some differences of perspective seem to have installed themselves in a relatively stable way. The present article can’t detail the shift between a paradigm dominated by the link between language and thought and a paradigme dominated by a communicative conception of the language. It can however choose a specific aspect of that paradigm shift: the concurrence between two definitions of rhetoric. The definition explicitly rejected but implicitly conveyed by dissertation manuals, tends to mask the situation of communication. On the contrary, the definition of rhetoric used by didacticians insists on the essential necessity of an audience. The present article proposes an analysis of the concurrence between those two definitions.

New technologies and pronunciation skills development

This paper focuses on technologies that allow a learner of French to improve pronunciation skills. This aspect of language instruction is very often neglected by the teachers who usually pin the blame on lack of time. However, in recent years we have witnessed the proliferation of Internet resources that can be used to help learners work autonomously on various aspects of their pronunciation. In our paper, we will also focus on different tools as well as methods used by the teachers to create new materials for language teaching and make them available on the Web as well as monitor the process of students’ language learning outside the classroom.

The teaching of the Italian prepositions in, su, a to Polish native speakers (levels C1 and C2)
– Cognitive approach

Prepositions are highly polysemous items and for this reason they appear in various semantic and syntactic contexts. As a result, they are very difficult in the process of teaching and learning a foreign language. It is important to know that even very advanced learners of Italian make preposition mistakes (Bagna 2003). Because of this, formal teaching of grammar and explicit correction has been focused on in the present research. The inclusion of explicit grammar teaching (Benucci 1994; Freddi 1999; Balboni 1994, 2012; Bettoni 2009) seems to be essential at advanced levels like C1 and C2 since such levels of proficiency are required for future translators and teachers of Italian as a FL. In this research, Cognitive semantics methodology has been adopted according to the findings by Johnson (1987, 2005) and Lakoff (1987) and Dodge, Lakoff (2005). Image schemas (an inherent part of the methodology) give image schematic answers to the way in which prepositional phrases meaning is built into language. The container schema allows for the interpretation of the unit in, the support and contiguity schema is a tool for interpreting the unit su and the preposition a is modelled by a path schema which highlights a static landmark deprived of shape when the trajector is only localized or an endpoint landmark deprived of shape as well. The same image schemas (seem to be universal perceptive tools valid also in language) provide a basic structure for the Polish equivalents such as: w + loc, na + loc, na + acc, do + gen. Obviously the same conceptualizations in both languages are not frequent. Prepositional landmarks, in fact, reflect different spatial categorizations. The non correspondence of prepositional units in both languages do not mean that the prepositional use is completely unmotivated. This seems motivated with the salience of a particular image schema in a given context. Such clues may result very useful in the process of teaching/learning Italian to Polish speakers as they could sensibilize students to image schematic principles that underlie the semantic interpretation of prepositional units.

Are dictation and the gap-filling listening test valid and reliable tests to assess oral comprehension?

Dictation and the gap-filling listening test are tests used by one of the major certifications in Italian as a foreign language, CILS (Università per Stranieri, Siena). They are intended to assess listening ability at lower levels for a specific audience (cf. Appendix 1). We believe that the validity and reliability of both types of test are questionable: it is unclear precisely what they measure and it is by no means certain that different markers’ assessment of errors made by candidates will coincide.