Café Italia

Carmela Dell’Aria is currently a teacher of English and Italian as Foreign language and a specialized teacher for students in special needs in a secondary school (S.M.S. “R. Franchetti”) in Palermo (Italy). She is also an independent researcher in the fields of virtual world use in teaching and learning languages. She graduated in Foreign Languages and Literatures in 1990 and then in "Language Teaching Technologies" from the University of Palermo (Italy) in 2007. She has been a contract Professor of Computer Assisted Language Learning at the University of Palermo from October 2007 to December 2009. Actually she’s investigating the potentials of MUVEs for foreign language learning, as well as the factors that impact the learners’ language performance, as part of her Action Research project submitted to the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari for the second level Master Itals in Advanced Didactics of Italian as a Foreign Language. In 1990-92 she was a multiple-tasks staff member of ESF courses (in charge of course planning, tutorage and teaching, teaching consultant). Carmela Dell’Aria has been teaching Italian as a Foreign and Second language since 1999, and she has been an Italian language assistant at King Edward VII upper school in Melton Mowbray (Leicestershire, UK). In 1999 she was also a reporter at the East Midlands Regional Training Network organized by the Central Bureau for Educational Visits and Exchanges (UK). Since 2007 Carmela Dell’Aria (Misy Ferraris in Second Life) has been carrying out Café Italia, a pilot project about teaching and learning Italian in SL. For this experiment she designed courses as part of the main project, around small groups of foreign students from Duke University (Durham, NC) and Dublin Technology Institute (Ireland). She has been involved in many projects in SL such as the teacher training at LanguageLab, BABEL Project (by Paulo Casaca and Ana Alves), ANITEL, WiAOC (Webheads in Action Online unConvergence), Tesol’s Electronic Village online (EVO), Second Life English Community. Her main current research interests are also learner motivation, encouraging learner autonomy, ICT and the use of Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning languages, non verbal communication, investigating the use of MUVEs and social networks in education.