Didatizar a reflexão metalinguística à volta da influência interlinguística: uma proposta de atividade sobre o infinitivo pessoal

Over the past 40 years, several scholars have investigated the benefits that a solid metalinguistic awareness can bring as a didactic tool for the teaching of both mother tongue and foreign languages (Ciliberti 1995; Cesarini 1995; Pugliese et alii 2003), as well as for the control of interlinguistic influence, which requires a structured and rigorous pedagogical approach (Peppoloni 2018; Cintra 2023; Pilati 2024). Indeed, the teacher can develop reflection-based activities focused on specific cases of transfer in the foreign language, using real data collected in the classroom, and monitor, throughout the teaching process, any progress in reducing its occurrence and in the mental organization of each language as an autonomous and distinct system. The proposal discussed here is based on the exercises by Lo Duca (2023) and presents a didactic activity for teaching Portuguese as a foreign language to an Italian-speaking university audience. It focuses on reflection and on the development of metalinguistic morphosyntactic competence concerning the personal infinitive in implicit subordinate clauses—an area particularly affected by the phenomenon of interlinguistic influence from the mother tongue (Castagna 2021; Migliorelli 2023). The aim is to make students aware of the use of this verbal form through descriptive and explanatory hypotheses about how their native language functions, highlighting parallels with Portuguese structures and enabling a hybrid grammar teaching approach that combines both bottom-up and top-down methods, within a contrastive and comparative perspective.