Teaching Aspect in Italian L2: Effects of Explicit instructions for Chinese learners

This paper explores the teaching of verbal aspect of Italian to Chinese students in relation to three very important factors in the learning process of a second language: the first is the background of the typological distance between the mother tongue of Chinese learners and the Italian language (Jin, 2008; Eckman, 1977; 1985); the second is the gap between the language education habits typical of the learner’s background and the target culture (Gu, Schweisfurth, Day 2010); the third is the role of explicit teaching of linguistic forms and structures (DeKeyser, 2005, Ellis et al., 2009) in relation to the previous factors. In a teaching perspective, through a comparative study on two groups of students, we note that taking into consideration these three elements together can improve students’ performance.