Basi empiriche per una didattica delle lingue slave basata sull’intercomprensione

The present paper aims to verify to what extent the L2 Russian skills of Italian university students facilitate the comprehension of written Polish, Croatian and Ukrain- ian. The analysis attempts to identify which lexical and grammatical elements appear to be transparent and which ones present greater difficulty and should be taught explicitly. Verbal morphology seems to be easily identified and interpreted based on parallel texts. Concerning the lexicon, the results suggest that while most lexical items appear to be read- ily recognisable, a short list of common, non-transparent lexical items should be included in the perspective syllabus. The study concludes that while the spontaneous intercom- prehension skills of L2 Russian learners are not sufficient for adequate comprehension, they can be significantly improved through language instruction with relatively little effort.