From comprehension to production: The role of mental anchors in second language learning through unedited film

The goals of my research were (1) to analyze the role of mental anchors in the development of discourse comprehension on language production of beginning students of a foreign language and (2) to describe the strategies used by beginners in understanding discourse while learning and acquiring the linguistic structure.; This study emphasizes the importance of understanding the cognitive processes involved in the development of a second language. Filmic discourse was used as the point of departure of instruction, thus providing language in use that created mental images, or schemas, mental scenarios to anchor students' attention to language structure through linguistic analysis of the filmic discourse itself. These schemas are said to reflect the structure of knowledge not just at a linguistic level, but also at the cognitive, pre- and postlinguistic levels. These levels are the same ones on which comprehension and production depend. With this work, I intended to integrate the theoretical findings of the cognitive processes of language development with second language issues.; Data were gathered in conjunction with a semester long teaching of first semester of the first year of Italian. Sixteen beginning students (9 females and 7 males) participated to this research. Formal requirements were established in the departmental syllabus.; I implemented the use of film as support to the learning of the material from the textbook. Classroom activities were aimed at the development of (1) comprehension; (2) linguistic awareness; (3) and production.; Final results suggest that beginning students can develop comprehension skills from exposure to filmic target language input.; Moreover, this kind of training allowed the formation, in the long run, of a memory bank for vocabulary and sentence structure that facilitated comprehension of more complex discourse structures, thanks to characteristics endemic to natural use of the language. The formation of such contextualized memory played an important role in allowing recall to guide language output thanks to the formation of mental anchors.