Il lessico nell'interazione didattica: comunicare il significato e riflettere sull uso delle parole in italiano L2

Vocabulary is often one of the main problems in L2 classroom interaction, both at receptive level and in terms of production. The management of classroom interaction is then extremely important in the case of lexical comprehension and production problems, not only to solve difficulties in L2 communication, but also from the perspective of language learning. When learners have to face lexical gaps and partial or complete opacity of lexical units, interactional sequences of “work” about the usage and meaning of words are generated in classroom discourse, consisting in cooperative activities of building, negotiating and verifying lexical hypotheses. These interactional sequences of lexical work, by answering communicative needs, attract the attention of the learner and create expectations. We believe therefore that they represent potentially acquisitional sequences, i.e. sequences, which are particularly favourable for second language acquisition, because they can help to facilitate the integration of new lexical elements into the interlanguage. This paper aims at analysing the treatment of vocabulary in classroom interaction in the context of teaching Italian as a second language, by focusing on the sequences of interactive negotiation of lexical information and on the interactional strategies which facilitate lexical comprehension and production. The analysis is based on a corpus of interactional sequences collected in different contexts of teaching Italian as a second language to adult learners in Italy and abroad.