A brief practical-guide for L2-Teachers: K-2 American children learn Italian

This article aims to be a brief guide for L2 teacher education – issue arising a growing interest in the last decades since the pioneering work of Richards and Nunan (1990) (see also Burns, Richards, 2009 and the references therein) – moving from some conceptual bases, but with the main goal to discuss the techniques in themselves. More specifically, according to the six domains classification proposed by Richards (1998: xiv) on the content and knowledge of L2 teacher education, this paper will address the first issue, i.e. general theories of teaching, adopting a practical perspective. This point of view is specifically modulated on the second language teacher needs and profiles (Tarone, Allwright, 2005)3, from novice teachers, who may experience a “reality shock” (Veenman, 1984: 143; Farrell, 2008) when they start their teaching activity, to the more expert ones, who want to adopt new strategies in order to improve their results. Therefore, this paper adopts a twofold approach to the teaching experience: on the one hand, it gives some brief practical strategies on how to plan a good L2 course; on the other hand, it discusses the theoretical reasons undergoing those strategies.