Abstract
Research on phraseology in the context of L2 learning and teaching began to accelerate in the late 1990s (Boers/Webb, 2018). Since then, several studies on collocation learning and teaching have been published, which demonstrate the strong correlations between collocational knowledge and overall language proficiency and confirm the positive effects of incidental collocation learning (Webb et al., 2013), repeated encounters and typographic enhancement of collocations in classroom activities (Szudarski/Carter, 2016) on the development of phraseological competence. In recent years, researchers in the field of phraseodidactics have repeatedly called for integrated text-based (Lorenz-Bourjot/Lüger, 2001; Ettinger, 2019) and more action-oriented approaches (Hallsteinsdóttir, 2011; Chrissou, 2012; Chrissou/Evangelos, 2018). At the same time, however, they still seem to be sticking to Kühn’s (1987, 1992) “three-step model” (extended by Lüger, 1997; Reder, 2006; Bergerová, 2010). The latter model proposes a systematic approach to teaching phrasemes in an L2, which has been applied to phraseological learning materials for various languages (e.g. Jesenšek/Fabčič, 2007; Ďurčo, 2016; Ďurčo/Vajičková et al., 2018-19; Albano/Miller, 2020); though this approach still follows mechanical exercises which do not sufficiently respect important principles of modern foreign language learning, such as process- and action-orientation and learner autonomy. The material development project for Italian L2 learners (Schmiderer et al., 2021) dealt with in the present paper considers the desiderata described above by following task-based language learning (Ellis, 2003; Nunan, 2004) as a guiding principle and by basing the material development on results both from learner corpus analyses (Konecny et al., 2016) and the elicitation of collocation profiles from the itTenTen16 corpus via Sketch Engine (cf. Jakubíček et al., 2013). The textbook provides L2 learners of Italian with eight complex learning tasks that address authentic communicative and intercultural activities in multimodal settings (Schmiderer et al., 2020) and enhance learner autonomy by using self-assessment tools and multilingual learning strategies. Each unit consists of a task cycle introduced by pre-task-activities and followed by a language focus. After the input-providing pre-task phase, the task cycle constitutes the core element of each lesson and encourages learners to achieve a clearly defined outcome in group or pair work. In a follow-up part, learners are asked to carry out two activities focusing on phraseology in the broad sense (including collocations and routine formulae), which are directly connected to the previous task and are based on the above-mentioned corpora analyses.