Teaching pragmatics in Italian L2: An empirical study in a foreign language context

TEACHING PRAGMATICS IN ITALIAN L2: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE CONTEXT 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 very encouraging, and agree that pragmatics is teachable, and pragmatic instruction outpaces the mere exposition to the target language. Therefore, research in the teaching of pragmatics has now directed its attention to identifying experimentally the most effective way of teaching. The majority of experiments in this area compare the effects of different types of interventions along the implicit-explicit continuum. This study presents the results of a classroom experiment aimed at comparing implicit and explicit instruction in the context of L2 Italian teaching. The targeted pragmatic features are the lexical and syntactic devices used to modify the illocutionary force of requests and complaints. The participants are (a) 42 Maltese native speakers studying Italian as a foreign language in a high school in Malta, of similar age and language competence randomly distributed in three classes; and (b) the same teacher for all three groups. A standard procedure is followed for the experiment. First a pre-test is administered, consisting of a written discourse completion task, an oral role-play and a multiple choice discourse completion task. Then, for six weeks the three classes receive different instructional treatments: in one class the targeted elements are directly dealt with through explicit teaching, in the second class through implicit teaching, while the third class receives no specific pragmatic teaching, as it is the norm in the school attended by the learners. Soon after the treatment the three groups are tested again with the same instruments used for the pre-test. Finally a delayed post-test is administered four months later. As expected, the two groups that receive the treatment outperform the Control group in the post-tests. However, results show marginal differences on the relative effectiveness of the teaching methods adopted. On the whole the Implicit group performs better in both the written and the oral production tasks, whereas the Explicit group shows significant improvement only in the written discourse completion task. This suggests that explicit instruction might be effective in promoting the acquisition of declarative pragmatic knowledge but not the development of the procedural knowledge needed for online oral production. The study thus contributes to the debate on implicit vs. explicit pragmatic teaching with a crucial methodological issue, namely the role of the testing instruments.