Developing a Task-Based Multilingual Corpus for teaching, assessing and researching pragmatics in spoken interaction in Italian, German and English

The present project is designed to provide a basic core for the Task-Based Multilingual Corpus (TBMC), a pragmatically annotated spoken multilingual corpus of Italian, English and German as L1 and L2, with a twofold purpose. Firstly, it will contribute to filling a gap in the field of applied pragmatics, paving the way for further investigations on pragmatics from plurilingual, cross-linguistics, developmental and task-based perspectives. Secondly, it will provide a significant first set of data and information for language teachers, professionals of L2 assessment, teacher trainers, authors of teaching materials aiming at developing courses and/or assessment products built on research-based knowledge and data. The most innovative aspects of the project are: (i) a task-based approach to corpus design, thus including a potential learners’ need analysis; (ii) a corpus annotation leading to investigations on pragmatics in context dependent communicative events within a function-to-form perspective; (iii) a plurilingual approach to pragmatic research, allowing an examination of potential interfaces amongst L1, L2 and LS pragmatic use and development; (iii) an interactional approach to pragmatic phenomena description. The project will produce mainly three relevant outputs: (i) the task-based multilingual pragmatically annotated corpus itself; (ii) research products focusing on intra-cultural, cross-cultural and developmental perspectives of pragmatics phenomena; (iii) samples of teacher training materials and task-based teaching resources dedicated to pragmatic aspects. As a first core corpus, the TBMC will focus on specific categories of potential users’ populations: International and Erasmus university students and professionals, employees in International and Erasmus support services. The development of the TMBC will be firstly based on Italian. The corpus will be incrementally expanded, including English and German.