CAN INFORMAL LEARNING OF ENGLISH FOSTER PRAGMATIC AWARENESS AND PERFORMANCE? Evidence from a short-term longitudinal study at an Italian university

This paper explores whether metapragmatic knowledge and pragmatic skills may be incidentally acquired through informal exposure to English, especially English online multimodal resources. A brief overview is first offered regarding the state of the art on Informal Second Language Learning (ISLL): its goals, findings, knowledge gaps and future perspectives. Next, considerations are made about the relevance of ISLL to the development of pragmatic skills. Next, a report is provided of a small-scale short-term longitudinal analysis conducted at a medium-sized university in Southern Italy of the receptive and productive EFL pragmatic skills of 14 students with high engagement with English media input. The focus is on the ability to produce, and to recognize the appropriateness of, the initiating speech act of offering and the speech act of responding to complaints. The findings mostly show fluctuating, rather than stable or evolving patterns, both in the students’ level of awareness of the sociopragmatic adequacy of phone-texted speech acts, as well as their ability to produce sociopragmatically adequate voice or texted phone speech acts. The study is part of an inter-university project (The Informalisation of English Language Learning Through the Media: Language input, learning outcomes and sociolinguistic attitudes from an Italian perspective) aimed at understanding how young Italians learn and use English in real-life communication practices outside educational contexts.