Data-driven learning and the acquisition of Italian collocations: from design to student evaluation

This paper looks at how corpus data was used to design an Italian as an L2 language learning programme and how it was evaluated by students. The study focuses on the acquisition of Italian verb-noun collocations by Chinese native students attending a ten month long Italian language course before enrolling at an Italian university. It describes how an Italian native corpus, the Perugia Corpus (PEC), and an Italian learner corpus, the Longitudinal Corpus of Chinese Learners of Italian (LoCCLI), were used to build a data-driven learning programme for an eight week long Italian language course. The paper shows how different kinds of data can make a contribution not only to the creation of learning materials, but also to the definition of learning aims and the construction of assessment tools, and it presents the results of an end-of-course student questionnaire.