Un approccio orientato al genere nella didattica a di- stanza della produzione scritta in lingua straniera

The recent pandemic experience has shown the advantages, but also the drawbacks of online language teaching. Given the growing importance of this educational mode, the paper addresses the issue of distance language education by advocating a genre-based approach for the online teaching of written production in the foreign language. It is argued in the paper that, based on its success in different areas of language education, the teaching/learning cycle adopted within a genre-oriented pedagogy has a strong potential with respect to distance learning. This might be especially true when the cycle’s stages are allocated between the virtual classroom and autonomous work depending on their nature (e.g., the modelling phase requires a scaffolding action on the part of the teacher and is therefore best accomplished in the virtual classroom). Such genre-based approach to second language writing is being currently used in an online course of Italian language and the paper reports on the first outcomes of an ongoing action-research aimed at assessing and improving. Implications for teaching are discussed.