Impoliteness and second language teaching: Insights from a pragmatic approach to Italian L2

This paper deals with impoliteness, a pervasive phenomenon in interaction that has been widely investigated in language studies over the last two decades, and, more recently, has also been discussed within applied linguistics. Starting from a brief review of the key points underlying the current conceptual framework of the notion itself, as well as of the main issues regarding the teaching of pragmatics, we argue that impoliteness should be given attention in L2 teaching, in order to allow learners to observe and recognize the pragmatic value of the impolite uses of language. From this perspective, a pedagogical proposal is presented and exemplified through an online learning unit of the LIRA repository (“Italian language and culture for online learning”). Although dealing specifically with Italian, this paper contributes to the ongoing debate in teaching, by presenting ideas that can also be extended to teaching other languages.