Abstract
The project investigates the maturation of oral and written narrative competences during the secondary school literacy development years. Literacy, the ability to construct and extract appropriate meaning in/from written linguistic material (Kalman 2009) is composed of several sub-skills, among which narrative skills stand out at school age (Ravid-Tolchinsky 2002; Kiili et al. 2013). Narrative skills build a bridge between oral language and literacy (Gagarina et al. 2016), enhancing the ability to use cohesive linguistic devices. We analyse the specific linguistic competences involved by narrative skills along secondary school and across contextual conditions, paying close attention to parameters such as multimodality, language variety and text type, in order to understand the determinants of internal variation. We also include a special focus on plurilingual competences, comparing narrative abilities in the home language and in the language of schooling for a selected population of heritage speakers of Mandarin Chinese and Arabic varieties, in order to evaluate the degree of shared communicative and linguistic skills across Italian and home language. The research design builds on a long tradition of studies using narrative tasks to assess individual linguistic competences and textual abilities, as well as studies observing the intertwining of linguistic and communicative competences in language acquisition, in a cross-linguistic perspective. Well-established methods are adapted and expanded, by developing a set of tasks specifically designed to capture the contextual dimensions we are interested in. Reference tracking is selected as an area of in-depth analysis because of its interconnectedness with broader narrative competences, due to its multifactorial nature, and because of its sensitivity to ongoing restandardization processes in Italian. Data collection is carried out in junior secondary and secondary schools and is accompanied by bottom-up, co-participated activities of teacher training and by the development of teaching tools, capitalising on the survey’s results. Our study will allow us to reach significant results with respect to the determining factors of variation in narrative skills on the basis of a manageable sample (ca. 150 individuals tested on at least 4 narrative tasks), with the perspective to replicate the study on a broader sample in future projects. The collected evidence will be immediately shared with the involved schools as part of the teacher training activities, and will also be made available to the broader scientific community by means of an electronic repository of transcriptions.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Chiara Gianollo
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica
Coordinator:
ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - Università di Bologna(Italy)
Total Eu Contribution: Euro (EUR) 130.622,00
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 65.311,00
Project Duration in months: 24
Start Date:
12/12/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
