Language teaching and learning strategies for understanding and communication

Action project on bilingualism in Turin

Turin, Italy

The Action project on bilingualism is a research on the languages learning process in an intercultural and integration experience carried out in Turin. It is supervised and coordinated by the Ministry of Education.
The research points at updating the typical bilingualism structures of the use of language by foreign children belonging to different groups, in order to get to a detailed and exact description of the stages and resources of the second language acquisition process. In another stage, it attempts to improve the teachers' training. Two of the important results have been the coming together of families at school and the experimentation of new teachers' training support.

Due to the program's integrated approach, the project contains three dimensions that spin around the students' second language acquisition. First, the children's use of language in the family millieu must be considered. All this is done in order to obtain a detailed image of both the language and the collective life in the students' countries of origin, and also the use of language and the ambitions of the most representative foreign groups. Based on interviews with parents as well as children's linguistic games, the project has been able to gather data concerning cultural traditions, social habits and the life and learning of different groups present at school. The diverse models built on the collected information have been the objects of classroom multicultural debates and the differences expressed have been used to create stimuli and pedagogical material to promote the students' interaction and multicultural awareness.

This project intends to respond to the problem of the presence of strong foreign communities in certain Italian cities` schools. Also, instead of placing foreign students in completely inadequate lower classes, it aims at an integration of a type of teaching adapted to these populations, in view of their specific aspects.

Centro Risorse sul Bilinguismo
Via Giacomo Bella, n°13
Tel: 0039 011 308 38 10
Fax:0039 011 308 38 08

Institutional Partners
Agenzia Nazionale Socrates
INDIRE
Via m. Buonarroti, 10
50122 Firenze
Tel : 0039 055 2380337
Fax: 0039 055 2380330

Several organisms work in the intercultural domain in Italy.
Ministry of National Education
Italy

Since 1999.