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    L’AltRoparlante (Italie)

Resources for assessing the home language competences of migrant pupils

Introduction
Why assess?
What are the principles of assessment?
Whose competences
to assess,
and how?
By
which means
 to assess?
How to get involved?
This page will be available in English soon. Please refer to the pages in French.


When and how to assess?


Examples


Drawing inspiration from the examples of methods and materials

L’AltRoparlante (Italy)

A local action-research project

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Context

AltRoparlante started in 2016 and was awarded the "European Language Label” in 2018. It was presented to the European Commission on the European Day of Languages in 2020 (26 September 2020) as an example of innovation in action research in the field of plurilingual education. At present, the project is being implemented in a network of 6 schools (including in some cases nursery, primary and secondary schools) located in 5 different regions of central and northern Italy, with a total number of around 180 teachers and 1,200 learners involved so far.

The theoretical framework on which "L'AltRoparlante" is based aims to combine the European perspective on pluralistic approaches to languages (Council of Europe) with the North American perspective on pedagogical translanguaging which fosters plurilingualism in the classroom (Carbonara and Scibetta 2020; CUNY NYSIEB 2021; Juvonen and Källqvist 2021, among others). Furthermore, this project was set up following a series of national and local surveys (Carbonara 2017; Chini and Andorno 2018) which documented a progressive decline in first language competences among learners from families with a history of migration, as well as signs of language rejection and shame. For this reason, the main aims of the project are to:

  • incorporate approaches based on plurilingual education and translanguaging pedagogy into teaching in order to take advantage of learners’ language repertoires and to support the development of their plural identities, thus preventing young people from being sidelined and marginalised (Cummins 2015);
  • encourage the development of plurilingual reading and writing competences;
  • promote bi- and plurilingualism and their cognitive advantages (cf. Carbonara, Scibetta and Torregrossa 2023);
  • change the preconceptions, beliefs and attitudes of teachers, learners and parents with regard to language(s) and linguistic and cultural diversity, in order to raise their awareness of language rights and encourage their commitment to education in democratic values.

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Assessment of learners’ home language competences

Action research measuring the effects of plurilingual education on learners

In parallel, research on various aspects of plurilingual education has been carried out as part of this project in recent years. Carbonara and Scibetta have collected and analysed:

  • sociolinguistic surveys on language use,
  • language portraits,
  • interviews with teachers and focus groups of learners,
  • classroom interactions between teachers and learners (or between learners) during plurilingual activities, and
  • the results of standardised tests designed to assess the cognitive competences developed by learners as a result of long-term plurilingual education (this research was in collaboration with Jacopo Torregrossa, Frankfurt's Goethe University).

With specific reference to the latter point, a target group of learners who had been exposed to plurilingual education within "L'AltRoparlante" for at least two years and a control group of learners who had never participated in the project were both assessed. The assessment used cloze tests in Italian (to measure the children's competences in the main language of schooling) and stories written in Italian as well as in their first languages.

The results show that:

  • in their stories, learners exposed to plurilingual education made greater use of terms to describe a mental state, both in their mother tongue and in Italian, than learners who had only been exposed to monolingual education. This means that learners experiencing plurilingual education mobilise specific cognitive abilities linked to the identification of the mental state of a third party.
  • Learners in plurilingual education show similar patterns of use of mental state terms in their narratives, both in their mother tongue and in Italian. On the other hand, for learners in monolingual education, the use of mental state terms differed across languages.

The differences in assessment between the two groups seem to confirm that learners exposed to plurilingual education have a tendency to develop specific cognitive competences to a greater extent and to a greater depth than learners exposed to monolingual education. 

Project website

References

Carbonara, V. (2017). Contatto linguistico, percezione linguistica e pratiche didattiche nelle scuole secondarie di primo grado della provincia di Alessandria: il caso di Serravalle Scrivia. In Vedovelli, M. (ed.). L’italiano dei nuovi italiani. Roma: Aracne, p. 227-46.

Carbonara, V., Scibetta, A. (2020). Imparare attraverso le lingue. Roma: Carocci.

Carbonara, V., Scibetta, A., Torregrossa, J. (2023). The benefits of multilingual pedagogies for multilingual children’s narrative abilities. International Journal of Multilingualism, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2022.2148675

Chini, M., Andorno, C.M. (eds.) (2018). Repertori e usi linguistici nell’immigrazione. Una indagine su minori alloglotti dieci anni dopo. Milano: Franco Angeli.

CUNY NYSIEB Research Group (eds.) (2021). Translanguaging and Transformative Teaching for Emergent Bilingual Students. New York: Routledge.

García, O., Kleyn, T. (2016). Translanguaging with multilingual students: Learning from classroom moments. New York: Routledge.

This section is based on contributions from V. Carbonara and A. Scibetta, respectively post-doctoral researcher in language sciences and plurilingualism, and researcher in Chinese language and literature, Siena University for International Students..