Forti, L. (2023). Corpus Use in Italian Language Pedagogy. Exploring the Effects of Data-Driven Learning. London-New York: Routledge. 

Corpus Use in Italian Language Pedagogy: Exploring the Effects of Data-Driven Learning provides a comprehensive overview of corpus use in Italian L2 Pedagogy. The author addresses Italian language corpus resources, their potential uses in pedagogical settings, and the range of research methods available to evaluate their effectiveness. Overall, the book:

• provides a comprehensive account of Italian corpora and corpus-based research on Italian that can inform the design, implementation and evaluation of DDL practices in Italian learning and teaching contexts
• traces the history of DDL, by describing its origins and discussing its theoretical underpinnings, in relation to both linguistics and pedagogy
• examines the state-of-the-art in DDL research, in light of the available empirical evidence on both etic and emic dimensions, while placing particular emphasis on the methodological gaps
• illustrates the main methodological challenges in researching DDL, from corpus resource selection to empirical evaluation of its pedagogical effectiveness, and describes how they can be overcome
• demonstrates, by means of an in-depth case study, how the guidelines provided above can be applied when researching DDL effects in a specific second language learning and teaching context
• discusses the overall challenges the field faces today, while outlining some desirable avenues for future research and pedagogical practice

This book will not only be of interest to those conducting research in corpus linguistics and teaching in the Italian domain, but also to those working with other languages.

1. Introduction; 2. Data-driven learning: Origins, theoretical underpinnings and development through time; 3. Delving into the research evidence on data-driven learning effects; 4. Methods in researching data-driven learning effects; 5. Italian L2: Corpus resources and language learning research; 6. Language gains and learner attitudes in data-driven learning: Study design; 7. How data-driven learning impacts language gains; 8. How learners react to data-driven learning; 9. Conclusions and future prospects; Appendix A. Sample experimental lesson plan and activities (week 4); Appendix B. Sample control lesson plan and activities (week 4); Appendix C. Phraseological competence test; Appendix D. End-of-course student questionnaire (DDL group); Appendix E. End-of-course student questionnaire (non-DDL group); Index