‘In the Presence of English’ Informal English Language Learning in Italy

Abstract

We are living in a ‘new linguistic dispensation’ revolving around multilingualism and multiculturalism, technology galore and an unprecedented mobility of people and linguistic artefacts. New opportunities have opened up to L2 users via the Internet, satellite communication and wireless technologies, while English language learning is moving out of the language classroom and becoming more and more informal - unguided, naturalistic, mainly incidental. The present volume engages with this new English-centred linguistic ecology by probing university students’ private worlds and undetected learning processes across Italy. The linguistic affordances available ‘in the wild’ are also explored with the aim of identifying the features that are likely to impact informal language learning today.

A few key thematic threads run across the volume. They concur to defining shared features of the novel modalities of access to and appropriation of English as an additional language in Italy. At the same time, they detail Italian learner-users’ increasingly diverse language experiences, individual language learning trajectories, as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivations in engaging with English during leisure time. The impact of the (new) technologies and the digital revolution on the expanding informal learning of English in the country is highlighted in all twelve contributions, with the access to audiovisual, digital, and interactional media emerging as a new form of language immersion freely available to English learner-users worldwide. Overall, this volume contributes to depicting the varied landscape of English language learning in the wild and provides new etic and emic insights into the relation that links youths to the language in online (social) media and registers, and pop cultural artefacts.