Borbala Samu, Andrea Civile

Borbala Samu is Associate Professor of Didactics of modern languages at the University for Foreigners of Perugia. She teaches Language education, Intercultural communication, Intercultural pragmatics, and Cognitive linguistics. She is involved in training and refresher courses for language teachers abroad and in Italy and coordinates a Master’s degree course in Teaching Italian as a foreign language. Her research concerns the application of Cognitive Grammar to language teaching, the development and assessment of pragmatic competence in L2, the development of language teaching methodologies and techniques to foster intercultural communication in multilingual and multi-ethnic learning contexts, and in technology enhanced language learning environments.

Andrea Civile is Italian Language and Culture Instructor at the University for Foreigners of Perugia, where he is also completing his Ph.D. in Linguistics and Language teaching. His research is focused on Italian language as a FL students’ sociocultural adaptation through the development of pragmatic awareness, especially via technology enhanced language learning environments. As a member of the GPP research group in Cross-cultural, Intercultural and (Inter)linguistic Pragmatics based at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, he is also conducting researches on how requests are formulated in different languages, such as Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese.