Corpora in the Classroom - the Case of the Serbian Language for Italian Speakers

This paper will deal with the use of language corpora in teaching Serbian as a foreign language. The earliest research on the use of corpora in teaching goes back to the 1990s and sees the DDL approach – data driven learning (Johns, 1991) – as the opportunity to the learner to have direct access to linguistic data and, through the inductive method, to reach the operating rules of a language ever more autonomously. Nowadays, thanks to the development of software permitting complex quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis, DDL, which studies the use of corpora in language classes, offers greater and more complete research opportunities also for less widely spoken languages. In Serbia language teaching does not currently allow much room for this approach (Vitaz, Poletanović, 2018), and so it is not surprising that for a subject that is still as undeveloped as Serbian as L2/FL there is almost a complete absence of corpus-based research. This paper thus aims to: shed light on the use of corpora on teaching the Serbian language to Italian-speakers; to present the theoretical and practical work done so far and to trace a possible itinerary for future research, which in an interdisciplinary perspective may involve lexicography, translation, sociolinguistics and other related subjects.