Presentation of the Study Sample Clauses

Presentation of the Study. In the previous section, I discussed the results of the investigations on L2 learners of Italian with a low proficiency level. In particular, we have seen Chini‟s (1995) implicational scale in the early stages of the acquisition of agreement (§ 3.1); usefu l observations also come from White et al. (2004), Xxxxxxx (2012) and Xxxxxxx et al. (2012): learners with advanced proficiency may fail to produce agreement in some cases, but according to the MSIH this is due to processing and production errors (“mistakes”, in Corder‟s 1967 terminology) (Note 4). In Hopp (2013), problems with gender agreement are due to a lower activation of, and access to, gender nodes. Morever, Foote (2015) has shown that feminine nouns and nouns with opaque gender are more difficult to process. Finally, various neurolinguistic studies discussed in § 3.2 show that gender assignment is more difficult for L2 -learners than gender agreement, and that the latter depends on the former (e.g., in the LBH). In the present study, I chose to discuss gender agreement from a different angle: while the literature to date mainly focuses on the outcome of the acquisition process, here I would like to take a teacher‟s perspective, discussing two concrete cases of advanced L2 speakers (with German as L1) that still show a high number of errors in gender agreement. In line with the didactic aim of this paper, the methodology chosen is a qualitative discussion of some typical errors with the aim to help teachers to address the topic of gender agreement in the classroom – quantitative considerations, on the other hand, are beyond the scope of this paper. The data discussed in this study come from a corpus built of my own transcriptions of video interviews and video recipes that are available online; in these videos, the two analyzed speakers appear. Since both speakers have the same L1, it is possible that some error patterns may be due to negative transfer from the L1. However, I think that the most problematic areas, e.g. cases in which more than one modifier is present or in which agreement targets a DP-external modifier, should hold more generally, since they do not have any reflex in German; therefore, they should not be the result of a transfer from their L1. Accordingly with the paper‟s focus on the didactic level, the illustration and discussion of the errors found in the corpus is intended to suggest possible teaching interventions. On the one hand, teachers can learn what the most common error...