Italian Slavistics and Second Language Acquisition Studies

Abstract

The article reflects on the significant growth of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research in the work of Italian Slavists over the last twenty years. More specifically, it discusses the fruitful contributions made to diverse strands of SLA research, including the acquisition of the verb system, pragmatics, phonetics, the role of input in the initial stages of L2 development, and the language teaching applications of corpus linguistics. The review stresses the relevance of these studies for the international SLA debate, emphasizing how research on Slavic languages often resulted in the fine-tuning of theoretical frameworks originally conceived to accommodate data from other languages (especially English). Additionally, it points out that most of the SLA research summarised here is explicitly designed in view of a language teaching objective (a synergy often advocated in the SLA field, but seldom realised) and thus has direct implications for the teaching of Slavic languages as L2s.