Análise da interlíngua de estudantes italianos de língua inglesa: aspectos coesivos e estudo do sujeito

Abstract

This study investigates aspects of the interlanguage of Italian university students of English as a second language and extends a research conducted by Perna (2016), which results were reported in Tenuta and Perna (2017). With a small sample of 16 participants from an ItalianLanguages and Arts Faculty, the research in Perna (2016) consisted of the application of some exercises, created and applied, previously, by Tenuta (2001) and replicated by Tenuta and Oliveira (2015) with Brazilian university students. Perna (2016) carried out a contrastive analysis between the interlanguage of the group of Italian learners and the two groups of Brazilian learners, related to the principle of information distribution in the discourse (Theme/Rheme and Given/New); the use of cohesive elements, namely anaphor; the use of nominalizations; the elaboration of passive structures; the recognition of the mandatorysyntactic subject as well as of the grammatical non agentive subject. All these aspects were analyzed in the light of Rutherfords (1987) proposal for the teaching and learning of a second language related to grammaticization and consciousness raising. The results reported inTenuta and Perna (2017) revealed that the Italian participants showed difficulties in certain aspects of the English language focused on that research. This motivated a similar investigation, conducted in this current study, through new and more specific exercises of some of those linguistic aspects. Then, the research reported in this thesis involved theparticipation of a larger number of Italian students. We worked, presently, with a sample of 100 learners from five Italian universities, which involved, likewise the previous researches, a simple count of the answers and a qualitative check of the following linguistic aspects: theprinciple of information distribution related to the concepts of Theme/Rheme and Given/New; the use of cohesive elements, discussed by authors such as Halliday & Matthiessen (2014) and McCarthy (1991); and the recognition of the mandatory syntactic subject and thegrammatical non agentive subject. This study was also based on the notions of explicit and implicit knowledge applied to the learning of a second language (Ellis, 2009; Ellis, 2015). We carried out a new contrastive analysis between the groups of learners, Italians currentresearch and Perna (2016), on the one hand, and Brazilians Tenuta (2001) and Tenuta and Oliveira (2015), on the other hand, which demonstrated that, in general, the Italian learners of English as an L2 have implicit knowledge of the specific discursive aspects reported here,although with low level of explicit consciousness of them. We confirmed that the contrasted groups have similar level of explicit and implicit knowledge, which suggests that it is still necessary to place a greater focus on formal instruction of those aspects of the Englishlanguage in the university context of the two countries involved in this research