Pragmatics of L2 gestures in beginners’ classes of Italian

Abstract

This article examines the responses that two groups of beginners of Italian in Canada (n=30) and in Italy (n=30) contributed to a multimodal exercise, where six culturally-based Italian gestures were presented alone and in combination with mini-dialogues. The main goal of this study was to encourage Italian L2 pedagogy to become more oriented towards the teaching of the pragmatics of body movements occurring during interactions. This work advocates that it is important to promote awareness of the pragmatic roles of the body from the early stages of language development to better prepare L2 learners in the recognition of the nonverbal contents communicated in a target language. One of the main results of this study suggests that combining target gestures with speech is a necessary pedagogical approach to enable the understanding of the semantics and the pragmatics of multimodal messages in L2 communication.