Studiare l’apprendimento linguistico interculturale come pratica discorsiva e interazionale

This article focuses on intercultural language learning and on the methods to study it. The discussion is divided into two parts. In the first theoretical part, intercultural language learning is defined as a linguistic and discursive practice, according to a non-essentialist approach. In the second methodological part, the article overviews the limited number of studies which, coherently with a language-use-based definition of intercultural learning, have employed forms of linguistic analysis to detect traces of such learning in class interaction. Finally the analysis of one extract from a class-based student-student interaction is presented, in order to showcase how different forms of linguistic analysis can be adopted to investigate the discursive and interactional features of intercultural learning.