«Tra di noi non è mai scorso buon sangue» Un’analisi corpus-based delle autobiografie linguistiche di un campione di studenti universitari con DSA

Abstract

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the study of foreign language teaching and learning in presence of Specific Learning Differences (SpLDs), such as dyslexia. However, current linguistic and ethnographic data are mostly referred to young learners, while there is almost no research on how SpLDs affect language learning in young adults. The present study contributes to fill this gap by analysing the linguistic autobiographies of 122 undergraduate and graduate English language learners with SpLDs at the University of Parma. The collected narratives were then organized in the form of a linguistic corpus and analysed both manually and digitally. Results show that the majority of these learners has developed a negative attitude towards language learning, which partly correlates with a negative relationship with teachers and a family environment characterized by monolingualism and/or unsuccessful experiences of foreign language learning. The study also shows that a wider range of terms and more original expressions are used by informants whose learning experience is negatively connoted.