Carmela Dell’Aria is a teacher of English and Italian as Foreign language and a specialized teacher for students in special needs in a secondary school in Palermo(Italy). She is also an independent researcher in the fields of virtual world use in teaching and learning. She got her Laurea in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Palermo(Italy) in 1990. She also got her second Laurea in "Language Teaching Technologies" from the University of Palermo in 2007, with a research thesis on “Emerging languages and technologies in the global education”. She was a contract Professor of CALL at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of the University of Palermo from 2007 to 2009 and 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. She has been teaching Italian as FL and SL 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 (Misy Ferraris in Second Life) has been carrying out Café Italia, an experiment about teaching and learning Italian in SL. For this experiment she designed courses as part of the main project, around groups of foreign students from Duke University (Durham, NC) and from DIT (Ireland).
She has been involved in many projects in SL. More info / links:
http://call-slingua.blogspot.com/
http://mymuvenation08.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/misy08/
Skype ID: Carmendell964
Yahoo Id: Carmen35_64
MSN ID: misette@hotmail.it
Second Life: Misy Ferraris