Per un’educazione alla scrittura accademica in italiano LS utilizzando i segni interpuntivi a partire da usi e interpretazioni degli scriventi di lingue slave

This article focuses on the results of a survey on writing experiences during secondary school and the first two years of high school and on the use of punctuation marks in L1 and Italian L2 by Czech and Slovak learners. Students’ past experiences with punctuation marks in L1 and references in Czech/Slovak schoolbooks reveal a strictly syntactic approach; students practise the use of the comma only, which is assumed to have purely separating values. In order to help students develop language skills for academic writing in Italian L2 and to avoid choppy writing and lack of cohesion, the research findings suggest that the teacher should highlight the cohesive/linking values of punctuation marks. The contrastive approach can be useful to a certain degree: up to the point where the punctuation principles of the two languages are equivalent or where they seem to be equivalent.