Insegnare a protestare in italiano L2

Abstract

Studies examining the effectiveness of teaching L2 pragmatics have increased in the past few years, showing a growing interest in the area of interlanguage pragmatics. Results are encouraging, and generally agree that pragmatics is teachable and pragmatic instruction outpaces the mere exposure lo the target language. Hence research on the teaching of pragmatics has now shifted its attention to identifying experimentally the most effective way of teaching (A/con & Martfnez-Flor, 2008a: 14). The majority of experiments in this area compare the effects of different types of interventions along the implicit-explicit continuum. In this contribution I will present the results of a classroom experiment aimed at comparing the effectiveness of implicit and explicit instruction. The study takes place in a FL context, where the subjects are Maltese learners of Italian randomly distributed into three classes: the implicit, Explicit, and Control classes. The targeted pragmatic features are lexical and morpho-syntactic devices used to modify the illocutionary farce of complaints.