Metafore e similitudini nelle autobiografie linguistiche di studenti di italiano L2. Riflessioni e proposte

The essay presents the continuation of a study - the first results of which are currently being printed (Cardona, Celentin, Luise in print). The study aimed at investigating beliefs, motivations, fears and obstacles that influence attitudes towards languages and language learning through the analysis of conceptual metaphors, figurative expressions and similes used in a corpus of linguistic autobiographies of young adults, learners or students of Italian as L2. Following a didactic path aimed at the recognition and creation of metaphors, and in response to a specific prompt, a group of university students learning Italian as L2 at B2/C1 level wrote a linguistic autobiography. The analysis of the corpus collected revealed a number of questions concerning metaphorical language and writing in a non-mother tongue, from which emerges the need to rethink the representation of one’s own linguistic profile in a multimodal and multilingual key.