Verbal misunderstandings and cultural misunderstandings. Language teaching and communicative competence: towards (and through) inter-comprehension

As recently remarked by Benucci (2022: 157), inter-comprehension, or approaching the process of language teaching in a multilinguistic and multilingual view, “rappresenta una modalità operativa fondamentale e potenzialmente fruttuosa all’interno della gestione dei contesti ‘svantaggiati’. (…)”. The need to identify this dimension also arose as a result of the difficulties caused by what Chick (1990) had defined as intercultural misunderstanding. that is, a failure of the communicative process for which all participants would be responsible. However, If it is true that misunderstandings in communication are mostly related to the different ways in which speakers conceptualize reality from their respective cultural, social and linguistic models, an approach based on inter-comprehension – that is, on the need to implement a common space in which making languages already known a tool for approaching to, and integrating with, the target language, can help to scale down the frequency and negative consequences of such mistakes. The aim of the paper, through the analysis of some case studies from contexts of teaching Italian as a second language to adult learners, is to show concrete examples for teachers of creating a functional and incentivizing inter-comprehensive environment for learners. A brief theoretical premise will be followed by the faithful illustration of some phases from a teaching experience in progress, where the positive results obtained by the students thanks to the tools of educational inter-comprehension also represent a ‘spur’ to create training paths for teachers that duly take into account these tools and this dimension.