Teaching and Learning Italian Abroad: A Comparative Pilot Study of Italian-Canadian, Italian-Australian and Italian Adolescent Speech

This paper reports on pilot studies of adolescents who have been studying Italian as a second language (L2), for at least one year, post-elementary (primary school). The study was conducted in Canada and Australia. The study focuses on the use of the Italian language abroad as a social dialect spoken by high school students, in certain social contexts in Canada and Australia were asked to complete a voluntary written survey. The data collected, once analysed, revealed a framework of patterns of adolescent communication, consisting of connotative and clique-coded language discourses. This framework was utilised to undertake a cross-cultural comparison on Italian adolescent discourse. The paper points out that it is essential for a teacher of Italian, as a second language (L2), to incorporate adolescent learning interest in considering the design of a specific learning syllabus