Еxplicative Markers in Teaching Academic Reading in the Italian Language

Мetadiscourse, as a specific form of writer-reader interaction, implies a set of linguistic and rhetorical devices indicating text organisation, the author’s presence in the text, his/her relationship with the content and the readers, all of which can be very helpful in terms of the text reception and interpretation. The aim of this paper was to investigate to what extent the students of the Humanities who learn the basics of the Italian academic language are able to identify and use one of the commonest types of metadiscourse signals, namely explicative markers, also known as code glosses in Hyland’s taxonomy (Hyland, 2005: 102). Their function is to clarify and determine more closely specific segments of a text, which in turn improves readers’ understanding and reception of the text. Descriptiveanalytical method and survey as a technique were used in the research. A reading comprehension test and a questionnaire were the research instruments. A convenient sample included 40 second-year students of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, whose CEFR level of Italian Language ranged from level A2 to level B2. The obtained results indicated that, after a brief and explicit instruction on this type of markers, the majority of the respondents were able to identify the markers in the text. However, only a few were very successful in understanding and using receptively the metadiscourse tools in question. These findings can be explained by the respondents’ under-developed linguistic competencies for this type of task, as well as by the complexity of the academic discourse in Italian, its nonlinearity, a considerable lexical density, and the prevailing hypotaxis. The obtained results give room to a conclusion that students would be able to use this type of linguistic and rhetorical tools efficiently if the curricula focused more on a systematic and extensive training and practising of the explicative markers which help readers to read and understand academic texts more easily.