Prescriptivism and the genre of pedagogical reference grammars for Italian students

Despite being thought of as – rightly or wrongly – one of the essential tools for instructed language learning, pedagogical reference grammar books are still mainly uncharted territory within English grammaticographical research. The aim of this paper is to illustrate some distinctive features of the genre of pedagogical reference grammar books for Italian students of English vis- -vis the notion of prescriptivism. The genre originated in Italy in the 80s of last century as communicative approaches started to become mainstream in Italian schools. The analysis is based on a corpus of eleven grammar books and shows that the genre is rooted in a view of grammar and an approach to grammar selection and presentation which may be dubbed ‘pedagogical prescriptivism’.