Didattica della lingua e mise-en-page nei dialoghi anglo-italiani di John Florio

John Florio is widely recognized as one of the most important representatives of the impact of Italian culture on Tudor England. The essay investigates on his didactic strategies for teaching Italian as a second language in his famous manuals, Firste Fruites (1578) and Second Frutes (1591). They proposed dialogues in parallel columns, in Italian on the left hand side page, and in English on the right, thus offering a synoptical display of the languages. Considering the type of text under scrutiny is speech-purposed and mainly in the form of dialogues, my study will take advantage of the basic tools of conversation analysis and of some fundamentals of (historical) pragmatics, focusing on language as face-to-face spoken interaction in context. After an introduction to the form and content of the two handbooks, I will turn to some specific features of Florio’s pedagogical dialogic style and I will also dedicate a few pages to the use of proverbs embedded within his dialogues.