Gli studenti della prima media e la competenza in italiano L2

Abstract

This research was carried out among a sample of 164 form 1 students who attend Carlo Diacono girls' Junior Lyceum at Zejtun. Some of the students are guided learners of Italian whereas the others are spontaneous learners. The main objective of my dissertation is to investigate scientifically the relationship between the marks obtained in the Junior Lyceum entrance examination and the choice of language to be learnt from form 1 onwards. From the results obtained it is concluded that the majority of the students who got the lowest marks in the Junior Lyceum entrance exam chose to study Italian in form 1. French is the language which the majority of the students chose to study. A brief questionnaire was carried out in order to verify whether the Italian mass media are still popular among the students. A series of language tests were used to verify the competence of the guided and spontaneous learners of Italian L2. In fact the results show that Italian television programmes are still popular among the Maltese students and that the media contributes to the acquisition of Italian as a second language. The majority of the students who watch Italian programmes for more than 1 hour were able to understand more words and short phrases than those who do not watch television programmes in Italian.