Abstract
This paper deals with the category of person and the notion of subject as topics of grammatical reflection at school. The fact that explicit grammatical instruction in L1 is usually limited to the analysis of ad hoc sentences, usually in third person and without context makes pupils unable to cope with relevant issues on the relationship between language and interactional context. The data presented here derive from a sample of 444 informants ranging from primary school to undergraduate classes engaged with the task of detecting syntactic subjects in a dialogic text rich in linguistic features that are typical of oral and dialogic communication. The results point to the difficulties in identifying first and second person subjects, especially if a subject pronoun is not expressed.