POPPI Franca

Franca Poppi has been involved in several research projects in the field of discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, with a view to analysing oral and written interaction. Particular attention has been devoted to investigating the main features of the dialogue between the writer and the student-reader in a corpus of economics textbooks and to investigating the interaction between the author and the reader in a variety of text-genres. In these contexts of use English is employed as a mutual means of communication by speakers who do not share the same mother tongue (English as a Lingua Franca) and is inevitably affected by the identity of its users. Therefore, the need arises to investigate the interplay between the territorial and the cooperative imperatives more closely. The attention devoted to the distinguishing features of interactions has also paved the way for a new reasearch area focusing on teacher training procedures and has led to the definition of a language profile for primary school foreign language teachers.