Prospettive teorico-pratiche sulla didattica della scrittura applicate al Portoghese come Lingua Straniera (PLS)

This paper analyses the objectives and possible outcomes of a small number of activities to be implemented in lessons of Portuguese as a Foreign Language specifically to teach writing skills. At the early stages of language learning, freewriting expands the vocabulary, improves orthography, and reinforces grammatical competence. However, most PFL manuals do not propose specific activities for learning to write, favouring instead the development of interpretative and expressive abilities. In fact, within a corpus of PFL textbooks selected for the purpose of this research, Aprender Português features dialogue writing activities, and Português do Brasil contains freewriting exercises; Português XXI provides detailed phonetic and orthographic analyses of single words, whereas Gramática Ativa only proposes fill-in-the-gaps and verb and sentence transformation exercises. Therefore, I will attempt to retrieve from a corpus of PFL manuals an input that is at the same time rich and diverse, but also understandable, as well as challenging, and to verify the application and enhancement of said input on B1-level learners, with the aim of enabling them – especially if native speakers of Italian – to write a PFL text which is not only grammatically correct but also coherent and cohesive. Moreover, I intend to compare the results of my analysis with the application of the protocols of planning, translating, and reviewing in PFL and of process writing, which was conceived with the purpose of enhancing the students’ knowledge of the common textual structures and discursive genres in a language’s rhetorical tradition.