La geografia nei modi di dire per un’educazione linguistica interculturale. Aspetti metodologici e potenzialità didattiche di una comparazione tra italiano e spagnolo.

Phraseology is a key component of the development of linguistic-communicative competence of advanced level learners of a foreign language (Wray 2002); furthermore, it represents a major teaching challenge, being a highly stereotyped and conventional part of a language. Despite their centrality in the acquisitional path, phraseological units are considered marginally in the language classroom, above all due to the lack of dedicated resources.In this regard, we will analyse the idioms of geography containing reference to place names or nationalities, for Italian and Spanish, to then use them in a teaching proposal that aims to improve intercultural communicative competence (Byram 1997) of Italian university students, studying Spanish as a FL at A2 level of the CEFR (2002). Methodologically, we started by extracting from the Dictionary of idioms of the Italian language (Lapucci 1969) some Italian geographical phraseological units. Then we made a comparison with the Spanish language, to identify total or partial structural correspondences, or semantic equivalences, although with different geographical references. The linguistic units thus obtained for the two languages were then classified in a didactic perspective, based on some defining features (Masini 2009, Sevilla Muñoz 2008). The outcome of this analysis finally made it possible to develop a didactic proposal, focused on learners’ direct use and exploration of the selected phraseological units, as well as on the analysis of their interlinguistic and intercultural affinities and differences. The idioms of geography prove particularly suitable for combining linguistic analysis, pragmatic aspects, and intercultural reflections since they are tightly linked to the morphology of the reference territories and the peoples who have inhabited them over time, thus producing culturally determined communicative contexts.