A contrastive analysis approach to the teaching of auxiliary selection in L2 Italian

A contrastive analysis approach to the teaching of auxiliary selection in L2 Italian

Radojević, Dragana

Auxiliary selection (AS) with those Italian intransitive verbs (IVs) that can use both essere ‗to be‘ and avere ‗to have‘, but with a change in meaning (e.g. È/Ha corso al parco ‗He ran to/at the park‘), represents one of the major challenges in the acquisition of Italian as L2. In this paper we argue that this is so largely because this phenomenon has not been treated adequately in relevant grammars, dictionaries and textbooks. In order to prove our argument we present a case study of AS with the IV correre ‗to run‘ involving university students of L2 Italian who are native speakers of Serbian. The results indicate that a contrastive analysis approach to the teaching of AS with IVs is more efficient than the traditional one, and it is suggested that it should be used more frequently in order to facilitate the acquisition of AS by learners of L2 Italian.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

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