Chapter Sviluppo della metacompetenza linguistica nell’insegnamento della L2 per il benessere delle persone e della società

Abstract

In Italian, the morpho-syntactic category of gender appears not only on all modifiers of the noun but also on past participles due to the well-known process of agreement and concord. The use of masculine for women referents associated to prestige roles may create agreement mismatches that can cause difficulties of comprehension as well as incorrect acquisition of the complex inflectional system. The paper focusses on how to enhance language awareness, or more precisely linguistic meta-competence on gender marking in Italian. This issue is fundamental in the enhancement of language awareness in L2 learners as well as in the L1 speakers who want to propose new forms of Italian that overcome the masculine-feminine dichotomic system.