Focusing on teaching Chinese grammar to Italian learners

This paper is aimed at fine-tuning some basic principles for grammar explanation targeted to adult CSL learners. Based on facts that are frequently described in the literature — such as the transfer into L2 of L1 syntactic structure, and its specific effects when the typological distance is particularly high, as for Chinese and Italian — we will highlight that the presentation of grammar structure: 1) should never be omitted nor neglected, must be blended with 2) the interlanguage error analysis (w.r.t. poor phonetic performance, improper lexical choice, word order mistakes, imprecise word classification) and with 3) the strict implementation of a set of “principles of efficacy”, i.e. it must avail of a definite teaching model and a sistematic program to be carried out, also, through practical activities based on appropriate linguistics input.