This article advocates employing John Stuart Mill's harm principle to set the boundary for unregulated free speech, and his Greatest Happiness Principle to regulate speech outside that boundary because it threatens unconsented-to harm. Supplementing the harm principle with an offense principle is unnecessary and undesirable if our conception of harm integrates recent empirical evidence unavailable to Mill. For example, current research uncovers the tangible harms individuals suffer directly from bigoted speech, as well as the indirect harms generated by the systemic oppression and epistemic injustice that bigoted speech constructs and reinforces. Using Mill's ethical framework with an updated notion of harm, we can conclude that social coercion is not justified to restrict any harmless speech, no matter how offensive. Yet certain forms of speech, such as bigoted insults, are both harmful and fail to express a genuine opinion, and so do not deserve free speech protection.

Measures of second language (L2) learners’ vocabulary size have been shown to correlate with language proficiency in reading, writing and listening skills, and vocabulary tests are sometimes used for placement purposes. However, the relation between learners’ vocabulary knowledge and their speaking skills has been less thoroughly investigated, and even less so in terms of pronunciation. In this article, we compare vocabulary and pronunciation measures for 25 Italian instructed learners of L2 French. We measure their receptive (Dialang score) and productive (vocd-D, MTLD) vocabulary size, and calculate the following pronunciation indices: acoustic distance and overlap of realizations for selected L2 French vowel pairs, ratings of nasality for ratings of foreign-accentedness, fluency metrics. We find that vocabulary measures show low to medium correlations with fluency metrics and ratings of foreign-accentedness, but not with vowel metrics. We then turn our attention to the impact of research methods on the study of vocabulary and pronunciation. More specifically, we discuss the possibility that these results are due to pitfalls in vocabulary and pronunciation indices, such as the failure of Dialang to take into account the effect of L1-L2 cognates, and the lack of measures for evaluating consonants, intonation and perception skills.

Nous proposons une réflexion méthodologique sur les choix adéquats dans le cadre d’une étude sur les stratégies d’acquisition du français écrit (L2 pour les sourds) chez quatre enfants sourds profonds de 5 ans, locuteurs L1 de la langue des signes française, notre hypothèse étant que, du fait de leur surdité, ces enfants empruntent des voies différentes de celles des enfants entendants. Nous rendons compte des questionnements méthodologiques posés par l’élaboration des critères d’analyse du corpus d’écrits, questions liées au grand nombre de variables à prendre en compte, aux dimensions à la fois linguistiques, cognitives, sociolinguistiques et didactiques de l’étude et à la nécessité d’adapter le cadre théorique choisi, conçu pour des entendants et impliquant d’autres langues. Nous présentons au final les tout premiers résultats de l’analyse conduite sur des échantillons d’écrits.

This article discusses some methodological issues that arose when analysing data collected in a pilot study of the SOFRA project. We aimed at piloting a semi-structured interview protocol designed to collect qualitative data with nine Syrian asylum seekers and refugees studying French at university, using an interview schedule that targeted, among other things, information about learners’ interaction opportunities and attitudes about their new environment and learning experiences. Analysing the manners in which the interviewer asked the questions and coped with comprehension difficulties, as well as the way the interviewees responded to the questions, led to the identification of a number of problems that are partly related to question type and wording. The article concludes with a reflection on how to elicit relevant answers during a semi-structured interview with migrant learners.

This special issue of the Journal of French Language Studies participates in the ‘methodological turn’ (Byrnes, 2013) in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), by presenting five original articles that focus on different methodological issues in studies on various aspects of the acquisition of French as an additional language. We highlight the contributions of the five articles and situate them within the larger discussion on research methodology. We end by arguing for the need for additional attention to methodology in SLA.

This essay focuses on the racialising devices that characterise some Italian colonial novels. Specifically, it looks at two novels of the late 1920s – Enrico Cappellina's Un canto nella notte. Romanzo coloniale and Guido Milanesi's La sperduta di Allah – with the aim of highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between the racist models they endorse. A critical close reading of the texts reveals the degree of interconnection between segregationist and inclusivist interpretations of the cross-racial colonial encounter in the first half of the ventennio. With this perspective, the 1936 imperial turning point, even though critical on the institutional level, appears less so in the cultural field of racist production.

Despite the ample database of research findings on the benefits of Processing Instruction (PI), research thus has primarily made use of offline measures to establish how L2 learners comprehend and process sentences. Using online methodology, such as eye-tracking, allows research to more directly measure implicit knowledge. The sensitivity of these measures requires meticulous design choices to ensure validity and replicability. This study provides an overview of the linguistic and physical design considerations necessary for creating eye-tracking materials in SLA research. The present study demonstrates the application of these design considerations in an eye-tracking study, comparing the changes in processing patterns between two types of instruction: PI and Traditional Instruction (TI) on low intermediate L2 adult learners’ acquisition of the French imperfect aspect. The results of the experimental study show beneficial gains made by L2 learners who received PI on the French imperfect tense, this was seen in both a significant increase in accuracy scores from pre-test to post-test and change in their cognitive processing as shown by eye-movement data. The present study emphasizes the need for future studies to consider methodological reflections and key design principles in eye-tracking research.

L’objectif de cet article est de déterminer l’impact de la tâche sur la prononciation du FLE, en l’occurrence sur le comportement du schwa. Dans cette perspective sont étudiées les productions de 145 apprenants autrichiens du FLE de niveau débutant à B1 dans la lecture d’une liste de mots et de deux textes, dans une tâche de répétition de mots ainsi que dans un entretien guidé (corpus de 87 heures et 45 minutes). L’étude se concentre sur la production du schwa dans huit mots et constructions : s(e)maine, ch(e)mise, premier, m(on)sieur, tout l(e) temps, tout l(e) monde, appartement et gouvernement. Nos résultats montrent que les 35 heures de parole spontanée ne contiennent que peu ou même pas d’occurrences de ces mots pour la moitié des cas analysés. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’une méthode valable pour l’analyse du système linguistique, il s’avère dans la recherche de la prononciation des apprenants indispensable de la compléter par des tâches d’élicitation. L’élicitation par des formes graphiques présente pourtant l’inconvénient d’influencer la prononciation par la présence visuelle des lettres (sans différence notable entre la liste de mots et les textes). Cette influence ne se limite pas au processus de décodage en temps réel.

This article draws attention to the understudied literary career of one of Italy's most famous patriots, Giuseppe Garibaldi. From 1868 to 1874, Garibaldi wrote and published three novels: Clelia (1870), Cantoni (1870), and I Mille (1874). Scholars have recognised the works as evidence of Garibaldi's anticlericalism and dissatisfaction with Italy's political moderatism, but have not yet sufficiently shown how the novels reveal the influence of Garibaldi's involvement with the female emancipation movement and his personal relationships with unconventional women. While Garibaldi is less well-known for his feminism than other men of the left, like Giuseppe Mazzini, his fictional heroines celebrate female physical strength and violence, offer women a means of participating in the nation outside the home, and challenge the predominant sexual double standard. While acknowledging that Garibaldi often conformed to prevailing patriarchal literary conventions, this article argues that his novels simultaneously offer support for the values of female emancipation.

Due to the introduction of the market economy, in the past four decades China has switched from being a “planned country” – planned economy, planned art – into a domestic version of cultural pluralism. Consumerism has refilled the vacuum left by the retreat of Maoist ideology. However, the overwhelming success of mass culture is sided by the progressive marginalization of the intellectuals or elite, featuring a culture that is kitsch in its ideological twist. In China, present-day cultural constructions provide a forum of debate for the identity of the whole nation, no more traditional, and not yet modern. In other words, consumerism and commercialism, triggered by products of market economy, have generated a cultural consumption of redundant bad taste. Kitsch indeed.1

In this article, I argue that even if we hold that at least some paternalistic behaviour is impermissible when directed towards innocent persons, in certain cases, the same behaviour is permissible when directed towards criminal offenders. I also defend the claim that in some cases it is morally preferable to behave paternalistically towards offenders as an alternative to traditional methods of punishment. I propose that the reason paternalistic behaviour is sometimes permissible towards an offender is the same reason that inflicting intentional harm on an offender is permissible – namely, that it is sometimes a morally justified method of punishing an offender for his wrongdoing.

China's commercial revival of the 1980s initiated a wave of nostalgia for old brands, which various political and commercial actors spent the subsequent four decades trying to develop, enhance, or exploit. Such attempts can be divided into two types: the heritage approach of the “old brands revitalization project” and the “creative nostalgia” of retro advertising. Both aim to nurture a sense of nostalgia for old brands, but they espouse opposing logic: the former emphasizing authenticity, while the latter mines the past for fun, novelty, and irony. These trends are expressed in the food sector, which comprises the majority of classic enterprises, and has been shaped by explosive growth. Rather than a generational rejection of the past, it is the rush to establish a presence in the crowded national market that drives China's classic food brands to repackage nostalgia from authenticity to novelty, from scarcity to replicability, and from heritage to retro.1