La protesta in italiano L2: un caso di autoapprendimento della pragmatica

Abstract

The present article reports on an experiment conducted in the area of acquisitional pragmatics. The study is qualitative and, given its short duration and limited number of participants, it is also exploratory. Six university students of Italian as an L2 (L1 Dutch) enrolled in a self-paced course aimed at the acquisition of pragmatics in Italian, specifically in relation to the act of protesting, on the online multimedia platform LIRA. The participants also engaged in a set of role-plays, involving situations of high and low familiarity, both before and after the online course. The underlying hypothesis was that in the role-plays after the online course, students would use a richer and more diverse repertoire of internal and external modifiers, resulting in more effective communication. The study provides a number of implications for teaching and learning pragmatics, s well as the characteristics of LIRA, the speech act of protesting and tools for data collection in L2 pragmatics, such as role-plays.