Slovene A2/B1 Students’ Morphosyntax

The aim of this article is to make an error analysis based on a corpus consisting of 58 written tests in Italian on the vocational maturity exam of Slovene mother-tongue students at an A2/B1 level. The objective of the qualitative and quantitative analysis is to identify the most frequent errors in the field of morphosyntax, to find out the causes, and to compare them with the results that emerged from previous research studies. The qualitative analysis was carried out on the basis of a grid created after I had completed a contrastive study of Slovene and Italian and later adapted to the data that emerged from the corpus. The causes of errors are negative transfer from L1 and in a small percentage from other foreign languages such as English and Spanish, but also the generalisation strategy. Quantitatively, the most problematic part of speech is the article, a part of speech that Slovene does not have, followed by the erroneous form or use of verbs and prepositions. The other categories, which exceed 1% of all errors and are therefore included, are the agreement between constituents, word order, and errors related to different uses of the pronoun, adjective, noun, and adverb. This frequency of errors matches other similar research studies carried out in the past with the difference that other studies included students with different Slavic languages as the L1. This suggests that all Slavic learners have the same problems in Italian written production, therefore the first cause of morphosyntactic errors is the difference in the grammatical structure between L1 and L2.

Pronunciation and writing between L1 and L2: some considerations on spelling errors of Slovene students

This paper proposes a model for the analysis of spelling mistakes that Slovene speakers make in written production in Italian as FL/L2. This model is based on a grid produced by other authors and adapted for the specific needs of the present research. The grid comprises four categories: phonological errors, non-phonological errors, phonetic errors, and punctuation errors. Each category is further divided into sub-categories. The aim of the research is to discover which category yields more errors and what their origin is, in order to propose scientific bases for improvements in teaching Italian to Slovene students. The conclusion is that students and teachers have to deal with first-language interference as well as negative transfer from English as FL/L2, another foreign language that students acquire, and universal strategies comprising generalisation, simplification, and regularisation.

The blame is on interference: a contrastive analysis of errors in the writing of Slovene-speaking university students of Italian

This contribution aims to address and show the crucial points of mother-tongue interference in the writing of Slovene-speaking learners of Italian. The issue is presented on the basis of a comparison between the language rules in Slovene and Italian in relation to the difficulties encountered in concrete contexts. The goal of this article is to identify the hypotheses underlying learners’ language choices. The article illustrates the mistakes made in the choice of verbal paradigms (consecutio temporum; doubts regarding choosing between the perfect and the imperfect and the explicit and implicit forms; some passive constructs; and the subjunctive) as well as the difficulties in using articles and certain adjectives and pronouns (possessive, demonstrative, and relative ones). The work also contains documented and commented examples of errors in the use of the comma and cases of interference that can be attributed to “false friends” (errors of spelling and of a morphological-syntactic, derivational, and lexical nature). The results of this analysis confirm the need for a conscious integration of direct teaching, noticing linguistic mechanisms, and a focus on form in learning processes in order to regulate the input, facilitate understanding, and stimulate natural processes of acquisition.