Will Second Life Help Me Survive in Italy

This paper aims at sharing the experience we had in the design and implementation of a short pilot course of Italian in Second Life® (SL). The paper will provide a description of the course mentioning preliminary findings, discussed in relation to the theories adopted by the two researchers. The paper is the result of the course, La Lingua in gioco: dire, fare e giocare in SL, that had a strong focus on the development of Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) and Oral Language Proficiency and was aimed at a group of third-level Irish students of Italian in the Technological University Dublin (DIT), who will spend the third year of their degree in Italy (Erasmus programme). SL was used as a virtual platform for foreign language education and learners’ engagement and as a support to face-to-face classes. This course is a part of a main project, Café Italia, an experiment about teaching and learning Italian in SL carried out by the University of Palermo.