Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) & Anna De Marco (Università della Calabria)

The role of interactional DM in L2: Acquisition in immersion and non-immersion contexts

This research explores the acquisitional process of Italian discourse markers (DM) by Spanish native speakers in two different contexts: in a full-immersion context at the University of Calabria in Italy and in an institutional 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 between non native speakers and between native and non native speakers in initial (A2), intermediate (B1) and advance (C1) levels of linguistic competence. This research is based in a corpus of 72 interactions, 36 for each learning context, and includes two types of situations: semi-spontaneous conversation and interactions elicited through a role-play, i.e. improvised dialogues in guided or semiguided situationswhere the participants have to reach a common goal which requires cooperation between them (Guil et al. 2008).
We analyse the lexical units, their functions and their position. Following Bazzanella’s (1995, 2006) classification, we pay special attention to interactional functions, such as taking and keeping the floor, asking for confirmation and feedback, showing agreement and disagreement. In order to identify the discourse function we take into account the relationship of the interaction to the context and the communicative goal of the interlocutors (Verschueren, 1999; Reddeker, 2006, Matei, 2010).
Our results show how acquisition in immersion and non-immersion contexts differs not only in the types of discourse markers employed by Spanish learners but also in their frequency in conversation. This is particularly striking in the upper levels, as it has been shown in previous research (cfr. Bardel 2004, Jafrancesco 2015). However, we have observed that phonetically light DM such as sì, vabbè, ok, non so, no? are present since the first level in both groups and this closely linked to the fact that we are not able to interact without DM, a fact that explains also the frequent cases of transfer and code-switching found in our corpus, especially in learners in non-immersion context.

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