The pragmatic competence of pre-service and in-service FL teachers of Italian in Malta

Abstract

The objectives of this research were to find out whether pre-service and inservice teachers give sufficient importance to the pragmatic aspect of language learning, whether they are pragmatically competent and whether they are being provided with the adequate training in the pragmatic aspect of the language which they teach. Are Maltese pre-service and in-service Foreign Language (FL) teachers of Italian adequately equipped and confident enough to explain to their learners the very often subtle sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic rules governing appropriate communication exchanges in a FL? Do they have the pragmatic awareness, knowledge and competence to raise their learners’ awareness to the pragmatic component of the language they are learning and in turn to develop their pragmatic knowledge and competence? Pre-service teachers and in-service teachers are generally well-trained and are very knowledgeable when it comes to the vocabulary and grammar of the FL. However, are teachers’ training programmes providing insight as to how present and future teachers can incorporate the pragmatic component of the language into FL instruction? Since the studies are scarce, it is not yet possible to determine whether preservice and in-service programmes worldwide truly equip prospective FL teachers to deal with the issue of pragmatic competence. Even fewer are the studies carried out with language teachers of FLs other than English. Results suggest that pre-service and in-service teachers who participated in this research have a fairly high level of pragmatic awareness, knowledge and competence in performing 5 different speech acts (requests, compliments, complaints, suggestions and apologies) in Italian, presented in 15 specific situations in the form of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs).