Students’ appraisals of their bilingual experience in a monolingual Italian reality: suggestions for improvement

ABSTRACT

As increasingly more upper secondary schools mainstream bilingualism via an array of strategies, databases collecting students’ appraisals of their bilingual experiences become invaluable for informing practice. This paper discusses how the ADiBE Interview Protocol was adapted to efficiently collect candid appraisals from 99 students attending a high school in highly monolingual southern Italy. Students welcomed the opportunity to shape their instruction, generating a database of commentaries from which 11 thematic issues emerged: three related to improved language competence, personal growth and general satisfaction, while eight themes called for attention to methods, materials, classroom management and even scheduling. Appraisals are presented, alongside brief discussions regarding implications for teacher-training, task-diversity, task-choice and translanguaging strategies for optimizing the shared L1 in monolingual classrooms. That said, appraisals also unveiled expectations for native-speaking English-fluent Content-experts, which, in contexts such as ours, is not only unrealistic, but depreciates Content-experts who, although may not be fluent in English, know content very well. Appraisals indicate that students appreciate the opportunity for receiving bilingual instruction and are willing to put in extra work to learn ‘complex upper secondary content through a foreign language’, a challenge they feel could be rendered more manageable via more learner-centred, language-aware and inclusive pedagogies.

KEYWORDS:

• Students’ voices
• qualitative ADiBE interview protocol
• upper secondary content instruction
• CLIL in a monolingual context
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Regolamenti Applicativi 2010 (d.p.R. n. 88 and n. 89): ‘The teaching of one non-linguistic subject through a foreign language starting in (1) the last year of all lyceums and technical high schools and (2) in the third year (of five) at linguistic high schools, where a second CLIL-language is added in the fourth year.’ (see: https://miur.gov.it/normativa1; https://www.gazzettaufficiale.it/eli/gu/2010/06/15/137/so/128/sg/pdf).

2 Some have argued that CLIL is ‘elitist’ (Bruton 2011): To help readers evaluate the financial weight of this tuition, note the following: the gross annual starting salary for teachers in Italy ranges from €22,000 to €29,000 (https://eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-policies/eurydice/content/teachers-salaries-2021_en); locally, the net hourly wage of housekeepers starts at €8.00.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Erasmus Plus Programme of the European Union [Grant 2018-1-ES01-KA201-050356].

Notes on contributors

Yen-Ling Teresa Ting

Y-L. Teresa Ting is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Calabria, Italy. She researches how findings from cognitive neuroscience can guide the design of CLIL/EMI instructional materials, especially for STEM at higher levels. Some of her CLIL-materials have received international awards (ELTons Award 2013) and been incorporated into students’ textbooks (e.g. Cambridge University Press ‘Talent’ Series).