The Role of Immersion and Non‐immersion Contexts in L2 Acquisition: A Study Based on the Analysis of Interactional Discourse Markers

The present paper deals with the acquisition of discourse markers (DMs) in L2 Ital- ian in two different groups of learners and focuses on the methodological problems of comparing interlanguage corpora produced in immersion and non-immersion contexts. The learners are Spanish speakers with an A2 level in Italian and the cor- pus has been collected in two different settings: a full-immersion context at the Uni- versity of Calabria in Italy and a guided-learning context at two language schools in Spain. The research focuses on the acquisition of interactional discourse markers and their role in the dynamics of conversations both between non-native speakers and between native and non-native speakers. We analyse the most frequent interac- tional functions conveyed by DMs, the types employed by native speakers and learn- ers in each of these functions and their frequency. Our results show how acquisition in immersion and non-immersion contexts differs not in the variety of interactional functions displayed by non-native speakers but in the higher number of types of dis- course markers employed, and presents the advantages and drawbacks of learning processes in both types of contexts regarding pragmatic strategies.