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is work discusses theories on teaching, learning and acquiring foreign languages. The input hypothesis has drawn attention to its role and importance in language acquisition. On the other hand, however, empirical research has emphasized the role that output and interaction play in acquiring and improving language skills. In most communicative acts, there are factors that jeopardise the process of communication, such as lack of lexical knowledge and speech too fast for the listener to understand, causing different comprehension problems. These occur between native speakers and non-native speakers, inside and outside the classroom. Negotiation of meaning can be only defined within an interactive process as the mutual collaboration between speakers and listeners in order to clarify a language misunderstanding using different linguistic strategies such as, for example, word repetition, simplified structures and clarification questions. From one point of view, negotiation of meaning is a communicative exchange and a step towards achieving communication goals. Learners and tutors are involved in communication to solve a problem whose clarification allows conversation to be carried on. From the other point of view, negotiation of meaning is an effective way of expanding the knowledge of learners, because some of the explanations can be internalised and added to their target language repertoire. Learning can be effective only if interaction is included in the overall language aquisition process.

This article presents observations and findings from an ongoing research on language revival among Italian new speakers in Crimea. Victim of Stalin’s mass deportations of minorities in the 1940s, the community experienced severe physical, demographic, social and cultural dislocation that led inexorably to language shift towards Russian. Through the use of ethnographic research methods, including participant observations and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the study explores the participants’ motivations, learning experiences and language use as they are involved in the project of reviving the Italian community.

The aim of this study is to present some teaching materials that were developed to teach contemporary aspects of the Russian language. The methodology is based on the recognition of the central role played by spoken language in the construction of language teaching syllabuses. The first part of the study describes the rationale and justifies the design of the teaching units; the second part presents the text of a mock lesson.

In both Russian and Chinese, there are conditional connectives that appear in the apodosis of conditional sentences and are derived from non-proximal demonstratives. This work will concentrate on the Russian conditional connective to and the Chinese conditional connective nà, which share a similar development from distal demonstratives and exhibit similar syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. The analysis will take into account that both Russian to and Chinese nà are fundamentally deictic and have a motivated semantic content, which is closely related to the respective distal deictic demonstratives with the meaning that. The main question addressed in this work is how the semantics of distal demonstratives can account for their interaction with environments marked by epistemic uncertainty. In order to explain how the spatial relationship is transferred to the modal domain, the research will draw upon the theoretical framework of Deictic Space Theory, a cognitive linguistic theory which grounds fundamental features of human language in spatial cognition. The analysis will show how the occurrence of distal deictics in constructions involving epistemic uncertainty can be explained as a metaphorical extension from the basic meanings of remoteness in space and time to remoteness in certainty.

This work investigates the range of pragmatic contexts in which the Polish distal deictic TAM ‘there’ appears and argues that these environments share the feature of epistemic uncertainty, which is the semantic common denominator to all sub-modes of irrealis. The use of TAM in contexts of epistemic uncertainty is motivated by its central meaning. TAM can not only convey semantic distance (spatial) with respect to a proposition, but also epistemic distance, i.e. it can absolve the speakers from the responsibility for the truth of the utterance. Epistemic distance is the feature triggering the expansion of uses from one conceptual domain to another., Studi e ricerche

This study aims to explore discourses of respect in the Education Department of a Young Offenders Institution (HMYOI X). The research builds upon the existing literature on the concept of respect both in restorative justice and in prisons to develop a deeper understanding of perspectives on respect in custodial education. More specifically, the study examines a self-narrative elicited from a teacher working in a YOI in England to investigate the discourses of respect which prevail in a custodial institution. The research findings provide a better understanding of the discourses and dynamics of respect within an educational custodial setting and of some of the problems and challenges that need to be addressed in enhancing and assessing the use of restorative justice in prisons.

This work seeks to establish the role that the Russian deictic TAM ‘there’ plays in conveying irrealis. TAM has attracted some attention among linguists because of its frequency of occurren...

Following Crimea’s incorporation into Russia in March 2014, the Crimean parliament adopted a new constitution granting official status to Russian, Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar. Despite the official multi-ethnicity and multilingualism of Crimea now constitutionally acknowledged, however, there is reason to believe that the formally proclaimed equality of the three languages has not translated into equality in practice. Among the areas where the inequality in language promotion and support is most noticeable, language education policy and language use in public place play a special role.

This work identifies and discusses developments in language policy and language education in Crimea since the peninsula’s incorporation into the Russian Federation in March 2014. Working on the assumption that post-Soviet reforms and changes in language and education policies cannot be understood outside their historical context, the article starts by briefly outlining some of the defining features of the historical and sociolinguistic situation of Crimea until March 2014. It then presents the changing linguistic situation of the peninsula since its accession into Russia and discusses present developments in light of the broader context of post-Soviet language ideologies, policies and practices. It suggests that the new Crimean authorities are following a double strategy: the imposition of monolingual educational and linguistic policies, accompanied by largely symbolic concessions to the demands of local ethnic communities.

This paper presents the results of fieldwork conducted among the small Italian minority living in Kerch, a coastal town in Crimea, between 2012 and 2013. After introducing the socio-historical background and the current situation of the minority, it presents and discusses the attitudes of members of the community towards the different languages which constitute their linguistic repertoires. The research builds on Bourdieu's theoretical approach to symbolic (linguistic, social and cultural) capital and on analyses and conceptualisations of linguistic identification in Ukraine and Crimea. Analysed data generate a picture of language use and attitudes within a minority group in the Crimean pluralistic environment, where individuals may feel allegiances and commitments to different ethnic communities and to different languages simultaneously.