Italy

Key Findings overall

In conclusion, the research confirms that Italian society is living through a general “question of languages”, and that there is a dominant fear of linguistic diversity (Vedovelli, 2010). As a consequence, competence in foreign languages is weak, from the most widely spoken to those which are less known, but equally important to the people who speak them, as they provide a link with Italy and support business in new markets.

The cause can be found primarily in the monolingualism which has been the distinctive feature of educational policy after the Unification of Italy and supported by a general societal refusal of the languages of others. Secondly it is a result of the inefficiency of institutional actions carried out by our State, characterised by the inadequacy of resources, organisation and training for teachers, and a result of a lack of systematic liaison with the business world. In schools the focus is exclusively on English, which – above all – is taught with limited resources which often make the effort of individual teachers or schools ineffective. Even today, young people who have reached the end of their schooling are characterised by the large number of cases of “scholastic competence” in a foreign language; a euphemism alluding directly to a lack of competence.

The immigrant languages present nowadays in Italy constitute a factor of neoplurilingualism which can contribute to making our country less afraid of linguistic diversity, but this opportunity is still ignored.

Promising initiatives and pilots

The effects of the introduction of CLIL methodology in upper secondary education and of MA and pre-service training courses for teachers could be promising initiatives but this is not yet possible to determine. The recent introduction of a year of training (TFA, DM 249/2010 and Ministerial Decree 31/2012) for new teachers in the secondary schools plans to open courses for teachers of Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Modern Greek and Slovene, in addition to English, French, German, Spanish and Russian, traditionally offered. This seems an important initiative for the promotion of multilingualism and the recognition of R/M and immigrant languages .

There are some promising initiatives and pilots being carried out by individual schools or teachers and they bear testimony to teachers’ capacity for creative responses, for instance when pupils that do not speak the national language join their class. In some cases they are linked and documented at a regional level, in particular by those regional authorities (such as Toscana, Lombardia, Emilia Romagna and Trentino Alto-Adige) which provide more support to languages. However, in many cases these initiatives are teacher or school-specific and are not continued throughout a child’s school education, and not aimed at being reproduced in different contexts.