Argumentation in classroom interaction. Teaching and learning Italian as a second language

This paper aims at considering the role played by argumentation in teaching and learning languages, by focusing on interaction strategies and lexical meaning in classroom interaction. After pointing out that argumentation is a basic dimension of classroom interaction - with specific reference to language teaching -, the analysis considers how argumentative discourse emerges from language teaching in different types of classroom activities. Emphasis is placed on discourse sequences of lexical “work”, consisting in cooperative activities of building, negotiating and verifying the lexical hypotheses, which arise when learners have to face lexical gaps and/or partial or complete opacity of lexical units. The research is based on a corpus of oral classroom interactions collected in different contexts while teaching Italian as a second language to adult learners in Italy and abroad. Even if the aim of this research is principally descriptive, the analysis also tries to evaluate the different ways of dealing with lexical meaning and argumentation in the discourse from the point of view of language teaching, thus giving some methodological suggestions for the teaching practice.