Contatto linguistico e influenza translinguistica: un’Indagine in una Scuola Internazionale di Napoli

The paper investigates the oral linguistic productions of children of different ages in two international schools of Naples (Italy), in which English is used as the main language of communication for all the taught subjects. In one of the two schools Spanish is also used but for a lower number of hours. In both schools some hours are devoted to the Italian language as well. Most of the students attending the two schools in question are Italian and live in the province of Naples stably. The other ones come from different countries (USA, Spain, France, Germany) since their parents work temporarily for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Naples and did not speak any Italian before entering the two schools. The purpose of the paper is to identify the possible crosslinguistic influence across the languages that the students master with respect to some specific phenomena (introduction/omission of subject pronouns, static spatial relations, movement verbs etc.) and that we investigated by the elicitation of oral tasks of different types (narratives and spatial descriptions based on cartoons and comic strips stories with no oral or written text). We shall demonstrate that the source of transfer is not necessarily the mother tongue and that influence can come from L2 or, in some cases, from L3, even when the source and the target languages present relevant typological differences (cf., for instance, De Angelis 2005, Bardel / Lindqvist 2007, Falk / Lindqvist / Bardel 2015). References Bardel, C. & Lindqvist, C. (2007). The role of proficiency and psychotypology in lexical cross-linguistic influence. A study of a multilingual learner of Italian L3. Chini, M., Desideri, P., Favilla, M. E. & Pallotti, G. (Eds). Atti del VI Congresso di Studi dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Napoli, 9-10 febbraio 2006, 123- 145. Perugia: Guerra Editore. De Angelis, G. (2005) Interlanguage Transfer of Function Words. Language Learning 55(3):379 - 414. Falk, Y., Lindqvist, C. & Bardel, C. (2015) The role of L1 explicit metalinguistic knowledge in L3 oral production at the initial state. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Available on CJO 2013 doi:10.1017/ S1366728913000552