Speech Variation in the Teaching of Italian as a Second/Foreign Language: A Critical Review

This study analyses the variety of the language used in textbooks for teaching Italian as a second/foreign language. These books use a language much closer to written than to spoken Italian and do not consider its varieties, providing examples and exercises with a “neutral” standard that speakers rarely use in everyday speech. The aim of this study is to provide a critical review of pronunciation sections in current L2 Italian textbooks, in the light of a renewed and growing interest in the study of the Italian language, not only by students with a migrant background in Italy, but also by second and third-generation emigrants who want to learn Italian to recover their roots. Thirty-two Italian textbooks were examined, considering some geolinguistic variables. The general tendency seems to be the introduction of some neo-standard Italian features. As far as the phonetic–phonological level is concerned, this is probably still insufficient because of the complexity of the Italian linguistic repertoire. Our analysis further suggests the inadequacy of notions such as (neo-)standard Italian for teaching purposes in the linguistic space of global Italian.