The Dictionary of Academic Italian (DIA): from Theory to Teaching Practice

In this paper we present the Dizionario dell’Italiano Accademico (DIA), an open-access online dictionary describing a set of academic words and corresponding communicative functions. The dictionary is the result of a two-year research project funded by European funds (National Recovery and Resilience Plan); in addition to the creation of the dictionary, the first objective of the project was to start a systematic inquiry of the so called “academic Italian”. In the first part of the paper, we give an account of the theoretical foundations of the so called “italiano accademico”, which can be defined based on some major parameters: field, semantic and pragmatic features, register, text type and others. Secondly, we describe the structure of the online dictionary, which is based on a corpus including different macro-fields and different text genres; the DIA displays two kinds of entries, word entries and function entries, both having a regular structure and offering several examples selected from the corpus. Finally, we examine the possible applications of the dictionary in the field of language teaching. Especially, we take into account how different users can benefit from the DIA: as for learners, the DIA fosters awareness of formal registers, enhances reading comprehension and supports conceptual writing. As for teachers, the DIA offers a practical framework for designing activities based on communicative functions, cloze exercises, and genre-oriented writing tasks.