Contrastive Analysis of the Interlanguages of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors Learning L2 Italian

Abstract

This paper proposes a contrastive analysis of the interlanguage of L2 Italian learners belonging to the category of “unaccompanied foreign minorsˮ, with the same L1 but different levels of education. The profile of unaccompanied foreign minors is complex and sociolinguistically very peculiar, since it is characterized by the frequent coexistence of a plurilingual ability and a (very) low, or zero, level of education. The study is based on oral productions collected through video interviews and studied with the support of conversation analysis. Focusing on the acquisition of verb inflectional morphology, the comparison of learners’ varieties aims to show to what extent several differences depend on learners’ profile and, particularly, on the only parameter that differentiates them, namely literacy vs. illiteracy in L1.