Interacting with SCOBAs in a Genre-based Approach to Italian as a FL

The purpose of this study is to examine how four adult beginners of Italian as a foreign language used the Schema of a Complete Basis of Action (SCOBA) based on Gal’perin’s pedagogical model during a course of six one-hour lessons. The SCOBA for this course was designed using the Systemic Functional Linguistic concepts of genre and register (field, tenor, and mode) for the typified situation of requesting goods and services during a service encounter in a restaurant. The study investigated students’ perceptions regarding the usefulness of SCOBAs for navigating this context of language use. Data from the students’ talk-in-interaction, interviews, and in class use of the SCOBA were analyzed. It was found that during the course of instruction students used the SCOBA according to their own communicative needs. For example, students used the SCOBA to orient themselves to contextual differences and language choices when register variations of the typified situation were introduced during classroom tasks. Finally, students were able to modify the SCOBA based on classroom instruction and their own insights into the typified situation.