Dvujazyčie russkich detej v Italii: novye perspektivy issledovanija

In the last few decades the study of the so called heritage languages has become an emerging field in the research of bilingualism, because migrant people often try to maintain their identities and minority languages. This work resumes a new testing experience, which has been conducted four years after the first one, with some Russian heritage speakers (HS) living in Italy and attending a Russian Saturday school in Rome. It will focus on the difficulties of language acquisition and the possibility for the HS to develop a better language competence through formal learning. We try also to compare HS’ linguistic difficulties with Bologna university students of Russian as L2. They both suffer of limited input and show some common problems of language acquisition, which could be solved by means of formal education