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The reflections proposed here have developed in the context of a Second Language Acquisition research I conducted at the School of Italian Language for Foreigners of the University of Palermo (ItaStra) between 2016 and 2019. Traditionally active in the city’s migration context, ItaStra has intensified its involvement in recent years as a result of the recent flows through the Mediterranean routes to the Sicilian coast (the gateway to Europe). We can refer to this scenario as “new migrations”, where the adjective “new” refers not so much to the time elapsed since the arrival in Europe, but to the characteristics of the migration path and the individual needs, including linguistic needs, of this migrant population. The adjective requires entering into worlds that have not yet been fully explored, within experiences marked by forms of isolation and confinement that are much more radical than those of other migratory experiences (D'Agostino & Mocciaro 2021a). From the outset, narrative, understood in a rather broad sense (cf. inter al. Busch 2015; De Fina & Georgakopoulou 2015; Pavlenko 2008) seemed the most suitable approach to capture this complex and at the same time fragile reality, increasingly present in ItaStra classes. Narrative has been used both with educational and research objectives (Amenta & Paternostro 2019; Amoruso et al. 2015; De Fina et al. 2020; Di Benedetto et al. 2017 inter al.) and before that as a mode of understanding, that is, “to give space to self-narration, self-representation and individual experiences, a recounting related primarily to the journey, places, people, but also languages, encountered during migration path” (Paternostro in prep.). From the linguistic point of view, this approach has allowed the emergence and exploration of linguistic repertoires as well as forms of access (or non-access) to writing that escape the representative capacity of the traditional models of analysis and classification (cf. D’Agostino 2021). Against this background, I carried out a study on the development of morphosyntax in Italian as a language being acquired by new migrants with little or no literacy skills (in any language in their repertoire). The aim of the research was to assess the impact of this variable on oral language acquisition in a naturalistic context (that is, through the mere interaction with Italian speakers and therefore outside classes). Here, however, I will not report on the results of the research or even the analytical tools used (for which I refer to Mocciaro 2020). Rather, I will discuss the method of data collection, which is built on a narrative approach partly modelled on the ItaStra experience, and in particular on the forms and tools of narration for the purpose of collecting linguistic data (e.g. the range of tenses or the expression of the category of person in learners’ interlanguages). I will also dwell on the limits that narrative-based data collection collides with when it is conducted in the very spaces inhabited by new migrants, the reception centres. In these often inhospitable and highly segregating contexts, where the psychological protection of the classroom does not act, the request to narrate may echo the tasks migrants have to fulfil a few minutes after landing and constantly afterwards: recounting and filling in forms on the basis of which their future will be decided (D'Agostino 2021b). As various fragments of migrants’ speech show, this can produce reticence and barriers that, in some cases, prevent the interlanguage from fully emerging and thus the researcher from collecting data adequately.
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