Comparing Tails. An exploratory study of tails in native spoken English and Italian EFL learners’ interlanguage

This paper is an investigation into the form, functions and patterns of distribution of tails (right-dislocated phenomena) in native spoken English and Italian EFL learners’ interlanguage. It draws upon two native speaker corpora (CANCODE, Longman Spoken and Written English Corpus) and a learner corpus which is being assembled in the Department of English of Milan State University, Italy. Although the study is exploratory in nature, I report preliminary findings which seem to point to the fact that tails do emerge in Italian EFL learners’ interlanguage, but with different patterns of distribution than they have in native speaker speech. Possible learning and teaching implications are also discussed.