Explicit teaching of syntactic rules for bilinguals/L2 learners and students with learning difficulties

This paper discusses four studies focusing on syntactic training of complex syntactic structures (passive sentences, sentences containing clitic pronouns, relative clauses) addressed to Italian-speaking students with Developmental Dyslexia, typically developing bilinguals, a bilingual child with attentional deficits ADHD, and an L2 learner. Before and after the syntactic training, all participants were assessed using linguistic tools assessing the trained syntactic constructions. The training activities proposed to the participants were developed following previous cross-linguistic studies and consist in the explicit teaching of syntactic aspects (argument structure, thematic theory, and syntactic movement) involved in the derivation of complex syntactic structures. The studies show that the explicit teaching of syntactic rules contributed to improving the syntactic abilities of the participants. At the end of the teaching period, the participants showed not only improved performance in the production and comprehension of trained structures but also generalization effects to other, untrained complex syntactic structures. In addition, improvement was maintained over time.