Socio-pragmatic Awareness in Learners of Italian as a FL

Each of us has a significant experience to report after the pandemic, but there is something we all have learned: we need other people and we need to communicate with each other effectively. This is particularly true when we need to use a foreign language. Still, the paradox is that, even if we have adapted to the “new normal” in the past two years, we have not changed so much the way we learn languages, continuing to insist, to some extent, with the deductive study of the grammar, leaving aside the sociopragmatic dimension. This presentation will try to outline insights from a Ph.D. research project on the development of sociopragmatic awareness in learners of Italian as a FL and, more specifically, on how to help them adapt to the Italian sociocultural context less traumatically. The target is a group of international students going to Italy for academic purposes: in the first phase, participants responded to an online questionnaire to report their perceptions about the appropriateness of some pragmatic acts in which they are likely to be involved; in the second phase, some of them participated in OER-based online classes designed to stimulate them to consider some in-context language uses.