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This paper introduces a new model defined ELFentextualization, devised for the English reformulation of the Italian legal discourse in the field of Migration. It is meant as a pedagogical and practical tool that can help intercultural linguistic mediators increase their competence at the time of analysing and reproducing source texts for an audience of non-native English speakers. In particular, our model is adopted here for the retextualization into English as a 'lingua franca' (ELF) of a number of extracts from the 'Bossi-Fini' law and 'Testo unico sull'immigrazione', which indicate the actions that migrants have to follow to request residence document. After illustrating the theoretical grounds of the ELFentextualization process, this paper will examine the selected corpus of English retextualizations of Italian legal discourse. The comparison between the original and 'ELFentextualized' versions will exemplify that the latter are elaborated after an initial phase of 'text analysis', which is meant to infer the gist of the message. The essential pieces of information are then reconstructed by resorting to lexical and syntactic simplification, as well as to the macrorules for text summarization. Finally, this paper enquires into the initial phases of a reception study of the examined reformulations, which will help discuss the lingua-franca connotation of the English uses in the texts under examination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper analyses multilingual practices in the primary schools of Bologna (Italy). More specifically, we investigate the linguistic repertoires of a sample of 78 students, as well as their self-assessments of their reading-writing skills. The analysis is based on a questionnaire administered in 11 highly multilingual classrooms, in which at least 60% of the students spoke more than one language. The results show that, on the one hand, Italian is indicated as part of the linguistic repertoire by almost all the interviewees; on the other hand, the majority of the students reported to have high-level reading-writing skills in Italian, regardless of the composition of their linguistic repertoire. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a writing task in Italian that we administered to a sub-sample of students, in order to verify the impact of multilingualism on writing skills through the comparison between the written production of multilingual and monolingual speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish and French are both languages which have a long-standing monocentric linguistic standardization tradition, however they also possess polycentric features, clearly visible - albeit incomplete and largely insufficient - in glottodidactics and related materials. This paper aims to raise awareness of the sociolinguistic dimension in second language teaching, by first providing a thorough theoretical outline surrounding the issue, followed by scale descriptors referring to the introduction of diatopic variations during the second language learning process, with differentiated issues in Spanish an French by considering intrinsic specificities of each language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the authors analyse the correlations between the bilinguals' discourse strategies and the sociolinguistic context of two types of linguistic minority communities: of old and new settlement. The first one concerns the Franco-Provençal context of Faeto and Celle San Vito in Apulia, while the second one deals with the Senegalese migrants' community in Pescara, Abruzzo. The aim of the study is to identify recurrent patterns in discourse that can relate to the presence of specific sociolinguistic variants, which are considered peculiar to the contexts characterizing each of the two minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Items of food lexicon, particularly relevant to fruit names, observed in the dialect spoken in Nemi, in the Castelli Romani area, are characterized by survival of the neutral gender. Materials, collected through dialectal inquiries, are analyzed from both etymological and morphological points of view and grouped according to their plural endings: -a, -ora, -i, and -e. A marked vitality is shown by the class of nouns with - a ending in the plural, such as u melu / e mela (eng. 'the apple, the apples'). This morpheme is also found in other sectors of the lexicon and in toponymy. An insight is also given regarding the sociolinguistic use of those forms, that reveals the variable vitality of the dialect among people of different age ranges. This specific type of morphological analysis applied to a specific set of lexical items confirms the picture of extraordinary variety of the Median dialects of Italy, which the dialect of Nemi including those of the Castelli Romani area, belongs to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]