Italian L2 address strategies in an Australian university setting: a comparison with L1 Italian and L1 English practice

The expression of social deixis by means of address strategies is pervasive in communication and reflects the culture and the ethos of a given speech community. For this reason, it is important that learners of a language know and abide by the rules at the basis of the correct use of address forms to be accepted as part of the community of speakers and avoid negative social sanctions. Recent studies suggest that the acquisition of the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic norms regulating the usage of address forms occurs late in the learning process and constitutes a hurdle even for advanced learners (DuFon 2010; on Italian as a foreign language, see Nuzzo 2009 and Nuzzo & Rastelli 2009). The present study reports on the initial findings of an ongoing investigation aimed at exploring the use of address strategies by English-speaking learners of Italian at an Australian university. Preliminary results show an overall pattern of address that favours familiarity and informality in class. This picture contrasts strongly with actual address practice in Italian university settings, in which reciprocal formal pronominal and nominal strategies are the norm and codify distance and formality in students-lecturers relationships. Our Australian results are more consistent, however, with patterns of address reported for the L1 English and appear to reflect to a large degree the transfer of Australian cultural values in favour of egalitarianism. We also seek to identify the factors that appear to influence the behaviour of respondents (students and teaching staff)–in Italian and English–in the Australian setting, and see that the expression of egalitarianism –in both languages– is tempered by local sensitivities to basic sociolinguistic parameters and explicit directions.