In virtual reality, language learners can experience the foreign culture by exploring authentic and contextualized learning environments. To date, there is a lack of studies investigating the use of highly immersive virtual reality for cultural understanding as well as learners' attitudes toward its implementation in the language classroom. This study addresses this gap by exploring language learners' stereotypes and generalizations of the foreign culture experienced in highly immersive virtual reality, and their beliefs regarding its use in the educational setting. Undergraduate students enrolled in beginner Italian courses viewed three ordinary Italian environments with the use of their smartphones, headphones, and Google Cardboard. Through surveys, written reflections, and a focus group interview participants shared their cultural understandings and attitudes toward virtual reality. Results show that virtual reality was positively perceived and helped learners discover new cultural layers generally not encountered in traditional pedagogical materials.

This paper conveys the reflections of an instructor and a graduate student after participating in a graduate course on autoethnography, offered in a college of education at a large public research institution in the United States. In addition to the course focus on autoethnography as a qualitative research approach, the course used authentic practices, which are commonly used by academics, to socialize doctoral students from the social sciences to the demands of their future careers in the academy. Although the number of published autoethnography articles in academic journals has increased, few autoethnography courses are being offered, and even fewer are described in the research literature. The authors share their experiences and address their own assumptions, challenges and breakthroughs across practices, including: informal peer-reviews, drafts revisions, and the ongoing composition of a full-length autoethnographic manuscript to be (potentially) submitted for publication, and, thus, shared with a larger audience of readers. The authors call for more explicit and authentic preparation and socialization of social science doctoral students throughout graduate coursework—especially in light of the growing competition for tenure-stream faculty positions across the social sciences and the humanities.

This cross-sectional empirical study tested the ability of Anglophone L2 learners of Italian (n = 87) to assign grammatical gender and number to a subset of isolated nouns drawn from a written corpus of current magazine and newspaper articles. Italian native speakers served as controls (n = 109). We first present a descriptive account of grammatical gender that outlines several idiosyncrasies and complexities than may lead to difficulties for L2 learners, particularly English native speakers, from a Feature Reassembly approach and a Minimalist perspective. We then discuss L2 learnability implications in light of the results of a written, computerized gender assignment task (GAT) showing significant effects for gender and number, ambiguous vs. transparent nouns, but not for suffixed vs non-suffixed nouns.

Second language acquisition researchers seem to agree that compared to traditional textbook-bound instruction, the use of video for pedagogical purposes provides significant enhancements in terms of context, discourse, paralinguistic features, cultural aspects, and student motivation. This study explores the use of the cartoon series Peppa Pig as a resource to enhance listening comprehension skills, vocabulary, and grammar acquisition, and to motivate students. Specifically, it enquires on how intermediate students of Italian perceive the effectiveness of the use of same-language captions while watching Italian (dubbed) children's cartoons in class. The qualitative data that were acquired throughout a 16-week semester show that greater accessibility to the videos was attained with captions on. While helping learners pick up the pronunciation of Italian words, captions also assisted them in isolating and noticing lexical elements, thus clarifying indistinct input and enabling word/phrase recall with more accuracy.