On the Impact of (Il)literacy on L2 Italian Acquisition of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to analyse the interlanguage of L2 Italian learners with the same L1 but different levels of education. The learners belong to the “unaccompanied foreign minorsˮ category, whose linguistic profile is characterised by the frequent coexistence of a multilingual ability and a very low, or zero, level of education. Focusing on the acquisition of verb inflectional morphology and on phraseological units as well, the comparison of learners’ varieties aims to show that several differences depend on the only parameter that differentiates them, namely literacy vs. illiteracy in L1.