Transfer phenomena from French L1 to Italian L2: a focus on the verbal domain

The present study investigates transfer phenomena regarding the verbal domain in oral productions of francophone learners of L2 Italian. The data were collected in Belgium with B1 proficiency university students. Starting from three depicted images drawn from the VALICO Corpus, all the students were asked to describe and tell a story about the latter for about four minutes for each picture, aiming to elicit different linguistic structures. The verbal domain is still not completely mastered at this stage of acquisition and that’s why it is important to investigate it. The analysis of the verbal domain starts from the morphosyntactic perspective and goes until the lexical one. Specifically, we focus on the agreement in gender and number between the subject and the verb, but also on the correct use of tense and aspect. However, transfer from French-speaking learners of Italian still needs to be studied in further research to highlight didactic consequences.