THE ROLE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TRANSFER IN ACQUISITION OF ITALIAN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Research shows, that nowadays most people speak or study more than one language. In a context of glottodidactics this fact cannot be ignored especially in the case of English, one of the most spoken languages in the world. In the classes Italian as a foreign language in Italy there is a high probability that students have a good knowledge of English, learned in many cases they learn it since childhood as a first foreign language. The case considered in this paper is no exception. When students decide to learn Italian, then this is not only a matter of linguistic transfer from the native language but also from the second language (English).

The idea of the following research paper comes from the authors’ academic experience at the University for foreigners of Siena, Italy. The mentioned University is specialized in teaching Italian as well as many other languages. The university staff is also actively engaged in scientific research on the diffusion of the Italian language and culture worldwide.

In this paper, the authors attempted to pursue the following aims. Firstly, to understand what aspects of the English language may prove useful when teaching Italian as a third language to international students. Secondly, to describe the strategies where these aspects could be used effectively in class to help students when learning their third language worldwide.

In the first part of the research the authors showed the results of a survey conducted on a group of postgraduate students who studied Italian as a foreign language at the Italian language centre in Siena to understand how they perceive the typological distance between their native language and their second (English) and third (Italian) language.

In the second part, the authors showed the results of a survey conducted on teachers of Italian language at the above-mentioned university. The teachers share their experience on the way English could be used in class of international students to help them in the learning of Italian as their third language. Also, the considerations of teachers of Italian help to reveal some cases where the English may cause a negative transfer (interference) and what may be the ways of overcoming these mistakes.

The research methods used in this article (questionnaire, observation, contrastive analysis, induction and deduction) allowed the authors to outline the aspects of the English language that may trigger or constrain language transfer when teaching Italian as a second foreign language.

The authors came to the conclusion that language transfer is indeed a powerful language learning strategy. Among the teacher’s roles, the authors cater for helping students to make advantage of previous language knowledge to improve the learning of a new foreign language.