Topic: In this thesis we will examine the oral production in Italian of Dutch students, in their second year of bachelor in Italian Language and Culture at Leiden University. According to the Common European Framework for Languages, the language proficiency of these students ranges between the B1 and B2 level and what will be analyzed is their linguistic accuracy, by spotting the presence of grammatical errors, in order to demonstrate that the peer review method can be efficiently used to contrast the risk of fossilization.Hypothesis: we would like to demonstrate that with the use of the peer review method in a second language learning environment, students will show improvements at a morph- syntactic level after having received feedback from their classmates and teacher. Therefore, it will also be possible to refute the theory according to which fossilization is an irreversible process.Methodology: The investigation will be done by listening to all the oral presentations of the students but also by reading the transcriptions, to make sure all the elements of interest will be included. The analysis will be realized into two discerned parts: first of all, because the field of morph-syntax is too wide to be analyzed in this context, a selected number of markers will be chosen according to their problematic nature for learners of Italian: prepositions and syntactic agreement. The second part of the analysis will focus on the comparison of the students’ performances before and after they received their feedback. This will be done with the help of a software, Wordsmith Tools, which will define the frequency of each marker before and after the feedback to determine if there has been an improvement or not.
展开▼
