Research
Research interests and approach
I am interested in the notion of action in language teaching.
This interest is at the crossroads of two broader issues. One on teaching-learning ecologies, that is the balance between methodologies, teaching artifacts and learning environments (digital or material), organization of activities, and teaching-learning action. And the other one on the participants in the teaching event, the teacher and the learners, and in particular how they approach and act in the teaching-learning situation.
In this indeed vast panorama, I am particularly attracted by the way teachers act and the class preparation process.
I do not yet have established theoretical or methodological orientations. I tend to seek to understand complexity rather than pursue simplification, and to benefit from several disciplines at the same time. I try to keep epistemological issues in sight.
Research experiences
Questionnaire on attitudes towards vocabulary
Internship in Language teaching and language acquisition
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Master 2 in Language Teaching - Univ. Lyon 2
spring 2023
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CeRLa Laboratory - Univ. Lyon 2, tutor Ms H. Hilton.
Questionnaire on students' attitudes towards vocabulary learning
Analysis of item wording and questionnaire structure, and data manipulation. Determination of the sample size. Statistical analyzes of reliability and validity.
Internship report, Memory.
Statistical softwares and data processing (Ms Visual Basic, Ms Excel, LO Calc, GNU PSPP, Jasp).
Histogram of responses to the item “it's boring to learn new words in English”, to which most participants responded “strongly disagree”.
Graph representing a Parallel Analysis, performed to determine the quantity of components to extract during Principal Component Analysis.
Metaphors from a corpus of council of immigrants
MA thesis in communication theory / semiotics
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Philosophy MA - La Sapienza Università di Roma
Directed by C. Marras, from the institute CNR-ILIESI, and E. Cadeddu, from the same institute and coordinator of the project Migrazioni
2014
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Corpus of the memoranda of the Council of Foreigners of the Province of Bologna, a political body composed of non-native speakers.
Analysis of metaphors in a corpus
The work is part of a dissertation in semiotics, containing a part on theories of metaphor and a corpus analysis.
Dissertation chapter (abstract English-Italian); scientific article. Concordanicier (TCS)
The main metaphors of the corpus, grouped into families or zones, and as a whole constituting the metaphorical "system" of the corpus. In the centre, the most important expression bring forward and go forward (portare avanti and andare avanti). The two collocations of forward blend with the metonymy of the voice (voce), creating expressions such as brign forward the voice of immigrants (portare avanti la voce degli immigrati).
Peer-reviewed journal article
Gabriele Tosato, Argomentazione metaforica in un corpus di assemblee politiche, RIFL - Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio, (2016) 2: 64-78. (article) (abstract)
Softwares and operations
Corpus linguistics: TCS - Text Concordancing Service
The TCS is a concordancer and frequency list extractor from the Italian laboratory ILIESI-CNR. A simple and easy tool, I used it for the analysis of a corpus in my Philosophy MA dissertation.
Link to the tool.
Questionnaires and statistics: VisualBasic, Excel, GNU PSPP, Jasp
Ms Visual Basic is a utility for creating macros, useful for automating data manipulation tasks with Ms Excel and thus guaranteeing the absence of manual errors.
GNU PSPP and Jasp are statistical softwares. I used them for my internship at the CeRLa Laboratory and the corresponding dissertation in Language teaching.
Edit surveys: Lime Survey
Professional survey forms editor.
Used in project Hybrid-it (Univ. Lyon 2) to create user satisfaction questionnaires. It is a powerful but complex tools; it can be used to create and manage research questionnaires.