Teaching Pragmatic Competence in John Florio's 'Firste Fruites' (1578)

Florio, our early modern colleague As an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) instructor, I see John, or Giovanni, Florio as a colleague: a professional language tutor1 and a “go-between”. He was, as scholars such as Montini and Pfister have emphasised, a man whose life was lived in a liminal space betwixt and across two cultures and two languages due to his multi-faceted role of linguistic mediation, as translator, lexicographer and Italian language instructor (Montini 2008, 47–59; Pfister 2009, 185–202). The linguistic and cultural “go-between” is a category still familiar to many contemporary foreign language instructors. Florio, like his father before him, taught Italian as a private tutor in the 1570s; indeed, Gallagher emphasises the importance of the domestic space in language learning in Early Modern England (Gallagher 2019, 16–18). His first language manual, Firste Fruites, was printed in 1578, and around that time, records indicate that he was tutoring students in Oxford. The current chapter examines his first published work through a twofold approach. Firstly, the text will be contextualised from a historical pragmatic perspective to understand its nature as linguistic data. Secondly, the text will be examined through the contemporary lens of Foreign Language Teaching (FLT) and Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP), specifically considering strategic language learners to determine how the text may have served as a tool for the development of pragmatic competence in their second language (L2), whether it be Italian or English.