Chinese Students' Development of Textual Competence in L2 Italian: A corpus-Based Study

The majority of studies conducted about Chinese students’ acquisition of L2 Italian since the 1990s have mainly focused on the analysis of learners’ phonological and morphosyntactic competences, usually adopting contrastive methods (Valentini 1992 and Banfi 2003, inter alia). More recent studies have been carried out from the point of view of applied linguistics (Rastelli 2010) and input processing (Rastelli 2013). However, textual and meta-textual competences of this category of learners have not yet been deeply investigated, even though the importance of such competences has already been acknowledged within important documents of language policy, e.g. the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR 2001). This article is divided into two main sections. After preliminary theoretical considerations about some key-concepts, I will first emphasize, according to a theoretical background (Scalise and Ceccagno 2005; Diadori and Di Toro 2009 inter alia), the role played by some factors in slowing down, as well as in causing difficulties to Chinese students’ development of textual competence in L2 Italian. Secondly, I will analyze the results of a corpus-based cross-sectional study, the purpose of which was to investigate some aspects involved in the development of Chinese University students’ textual skills in Italian as a Second Language