The pragmatic competence of student-teachers of Italian L2

Abstract

Pragmatics is rarely included in teacher-training courses. It is therefore worth investigating whether student-teachers of an L2 are familiar with it, especially when the pragmatic features under question are L2-specific. In this paper, we present results from an investigation on 15 Maltese future teachers of Italian who, despite being exposed regularly to Italian, did not attend any courses specifically on Italian pragmatics. Data regarding the production of requests and complaints were collected via role-plays (RP) and discourse completion tasks (DCTs) and were evaluated by native speakers. Results show that, despite an overall positive performance, subjects displayed a certain lack of sensitivity towards contextual variables and that RPs were rated lower than DCTs. Enhancing pragmatic awareness can thus be seen as an essential aspect of language education.