Teaching to manage implicit linguistic meanings. The state of the art and future perspectives

Conveying information implicitly can reduce epistemic vigilance and critical attention. Commercial advertising and political propaganda often exploit this property of linguistic implicitness to covertly convey questionable content, leading to the manipulation of their audience. This highlights the necessity of educating individuals to recognize implicit content and to critically engage with it, a practice that has not been sufficiently emphasized thus far. The paper provides a survey of (i) the primary theoretical and experimental studies on the subject and (ii) some educational resources and materials currently available to the public in Europe, aimed at enhancing awareness regarding the cognitive and social ramifications of implicit information transmission, particularly through the media. The paper also offers (iii) specific didactic proposals based on the authors’ research and teaching experiences.