Chapter 14
The pragmatic competence of student-teachers of Italian L2
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.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Methodology
- 2.1Participants
- 2.2Procedure
- 3.Results
- 4.Discussion
- 5.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by (2)
Cited by two other publications
Nuzzo, Elena & Clorinda Donato
2023.
Investigating L2 Pragmatic Development in Tandem Telecollaboration. In
Telecollaboration Applications in Foreign Language Classrooms [
Advances in Educational Technologies and Instructional Design, ],
► pp. 69 ff.

Melissourgou, Maria N. & Katerina T. Frantzi
2018.
Moving Away from the Implicit Teaching of Genres in the L2 Classroom.
Corpus Pragmatics 2:4
► pp. 351 ff.

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