“Starting from tomorrow the lessons will be held online”. The challenges of a pandemic for the teaching of Italian as L2

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the teaching of L2 Italian in mainstream schools in the school year 2019/2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. The teachers’ perspective on the online teaching experience is explored through semi-structured interviews focusing on the challenges and the didactic and organisa-tion strategies connected to distance teaching, conducted with 14 teachers of L2 Ital-ian working in three different municipalities of the Emilia Romagna Region.