Conceptual Error Theory and the Teaching of Italian (Report)

Introduction is well known, there is a long-standing tradition of studying and researching errors in classroom second-language (SL) speech within applied linguistics. This line of inquiry, which initiates formally in 1927 with the work of Charles Fries, has solidly documented over the years how the native language, the native culture, and the various intrinsic psychological learning mechanisms both detract from, and contribute to, SL learning. Essentially, leading researchers in applied linguistics have examined and theorized about how linguistic (phonological, grammatical, semantic, lexical) and communicative (pragmatic, stylistic) errors emerge in typical learning contexts, the stages they are purported to follow, the categories they fall into, the pedagogical implications they entail, and so on and so forth. Until the decade of the 2000s, however, the researchers had rarely considered a type of error that is traceable not to phonological, grammatical, semantic, or communicative systems in contact, but rather to differential conceptual codes that are intertwined with these systems. This type of error was called a conceptual error as far back as the early 1990s (Danesi 1993). Its presence and influence on SL learning is undeniable as research is starting to show. Even something as seemingly uncomplicated as telling time turns out to involve unconscious conceptual nuances that crystallize in contrasting linguistic and communicative forms between languages. Referring, for example, to 5 pm as le diciassette in Italian is a case-in-point. Even though the two modes of speech refer to the same time of the day, they reveal a differential conceptualization that involves cultural processes. In a phrase, Italians say le diciassette; English speakers 5 pro. Le cinque is, of course an option in Italian; whereas seventeen hundred hours is not in ordinary conversational English. In the latter language, the use of expressions such as seventeen hundred hours is restricted to formal, military, and other such contexts. Such contrasts can hardly be traced to divergent grammatical or lexical rules or conventions; they are conceptual and, thus, necessarily, cultural.