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The paper presents activities specifically conceived to stimulate high school students in the first two years to read, summarize and comprehend argumentative texts. Specifically this article describes exercises on contrastive summaries which, synthesizing a text, express an “assent-or-dissent” position with regards to the thesis expressed in the source text. These exercises have proved to be effective for students to reflect on vocabulary and some grammatical and textual structures.

The mastery of formulaic sequences by language learners is considered to be crucial since it enables them to accomplish the basic communicative requirements (Wray, 2002) of target language use. Of all the formulaic sequences, the mastery of collocations is known to have an enormous impact on learners’ ability to move beyond the intermediate level. This data-driven study explores the word combinations (both conventional and unconventional L2 strings) of L2 users of English. Specifically, the adjective-noun combinations in an L2 corpus (TUWE) were explored to find the potential L2 strings functioning as unconventional collocations. Then, these L2 strings were compared with the adjective-noun collocations in the LOCNESS corpus to determine whether the choices made by L2 learners differed from those of L1 users. The findings show that the spectrum of the L2 word combinations was broader in comparison with LOCNESS. The results suggest that the L2 learners produced a higher number of unconventional collocations than conventional collocations matching with the L1. The L2 strings support that the use of collocations can be rather problematic for learners of English however advanced they are. Some pedagogical implications of the findings for explicit collocation and vocabulary teaching are discussed.

Coherence and cohesion are often seen as fundamental elements of learners’ textual competences, and their correct realisation is just as often required by teachers. While text linguistics has long been confronted with the constructs of coherence and cohesion and has developed convincing theoretical models, it is much rarer to see these theories transformed into easy-to-use evaluation grids. In this paper, we present the process of constructing a grid tailored to the evaluation of coherence and cohesion, as defined by the Basel Model of textuality. The production of the scale is carried out within the broader framework of the project ITACA – Coherence in Academic ITAlian, a research project devoted to the analysis of high school students' argumentative texts written in L1 Italian.