The role of immersion and non-immersion contexts in L2 Acquisition : a study based on the analysis of interactional discourse markers

Abstract

The present paper deals with the acquisition of discourse markers (DMs) in L2 Italian 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 corpus has been collected in two different settings: a full-immersion context at the University 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 interactional functions conveyed by DMs, the types employed by native speakers and learners 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 discourse markers employed, and presents the advantages and drawbacks of learning processes in both types of contexts regarding pragmatic strategies.