Enseñanza y aprendizaje del italiano con las redes socialesun estudio sobre la adquisición del léxico

Abstract

Due to the irruption of new technologies, the teaching and learning of a foreign language can take place outside the classroom and in a wide range of locations and occasions, which constitutes an unprecedent situation. Furthermore, the arrival of social networks has allowed students to learn and interact with others inside and outside the classroom at any moment as long as they have a mobile device (a tablet, a laptop or a smartphone) and a stable Internet connection to practice the target language. The present study intends to find out in which ways social networks (Facebook, in this case) can have an effect on the acquisition of a foreign language. With such purpose in mind, the interlanguage of an experimental group of students who have used Facebook constantly and voluntarily as a tool to complement the contents of their textbook throughout the course has been compared to the interlanguage of a control group whose students have not used Facebook as a complementary tool. The research has focused on the vocabulary acquired by university students who are studying Italian as part of their curriculum in BA Modern Languages. Taking into consideration the comments provided by each group of students on the 21 posts published on Facebook, two corpora have been compiled. Data related to the lexical competence have been extracted and analysed within the framework of computational linguistics. In addition, the lexical errors of each corpus have been classified and compared with the aid of statistical tables...