Didactics of pragmatics as a way to improve social media literacy. An experiment proposal with Polish and Italian students in L1

Abstract

Education plays a crucial role in equipping today’s and future citizens with the necessary intellectual tools to critically read or listen to propagandistic messages. Often enough, the persuasive strength of these messages lies more conspicuously in what they convey implicitly than in what they overtly express. The paper presents the first results of a pilot study with students from the University of Krakow involved in a research-based seminar on implicitness in political tweets. Subsequently we describe an experimental project aimed at honing and / or reinforcing high school students’ abilities to detect implicit content in a corpus of Twitter messages produced by Italian and Polish politicians. The project, which also focusses on manipulative linguistic strategies in a comparative perspective, intends to sensitize laypeople as well as those engaged in the field of education to the challenges and threats posed by social networking sites (SNS) as they contribute to a massive diffusion of information, thereby forging a tacit consensus based on blindly accepted beliefs and ideologies.