Prosodie ermitteln und vermitteln. Eine Grundgrammatik der deutschen Prosodie für den DaF-Unterricht in Italien

Abstract

This paper proposes a view of prosody as a core grammatical component in the teaching of German as a foreign language (DaF), focusing on Italian learners. Although research on language acquisition emphasises the importance of prosodic features such as stress, rhythm and intonation for perception and communication, prosody still remains marginal in DaF pedagogy. Adopting a functional-pragmatic approach, the paper shows that prosody plays a pivotal role in German, particularly in encoding information structure. It also discusses the prosodic difficulties typically encountered by Italian learners, particularly those related to the rhythmic differences between the two languages and to the realization of sentence stress and focus. Finally, the paper outlines didactic implications and suggests practical teaching strategies aimed at improving learners’ prosodic competence through perception, visualization and communicative exercises.