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

Figures & data

Table 1. Organization of the four IGCSE courses throughout, and in relation to, students’ regular 5-year curricular coursework.

Year	Travel & Tourism (T&T)	English as a Second Language (ESL)	Combined Science (CombSci)	Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
1^a	T&T	ESL
2^a	Certification End Year 2	ESL
3^b		Certification End Year 3	CombSci
4^b			Certification End Year 4	ICT
5^b				Certification End Year 5

^a Year-1 and Year-2 (27 h/wk curriculum; 9 subjects): Italian Language and Literature 4 h/wk; Latin 5 h/wk; Greek 4 h/wk; English 3 h/wk; History & Geography 3 h/wk; Mathematics 3 h/wk; Science 2 h/wk; Physical Education 2 h/wk; Religion 1 h/wk.

^b Years-3, -4 and -5 (31 h/wk curriculum; 12 subjects as above with the following differences): Latin 4 h/wk; Greek 3 h/wk; Philosophy 3 h/wk; Mathematics 2 h/wk; Physics 2 h/wk; Art History 2 h/wk.

Table 2. General information regarding cohort.

Year (Num. Classes)	1 (2 classes)	2 (2 classes)	3 (2 classes)	4 (1 class)
Num. Students per Year	30	35	44	20
Average Age	13.3	14.2	15.5	16.5

Table 3. Thematic issues emerging from the appraisals and the frequency (n) each theme was mentioned.

Emergent Themes	Tokens (n)	Examples of Thematic Appraisals
1. Calling for different instructional strategies (32%)
1.1. Need different materials and resources	43	• We could use books that are bilingual and not only in English, to understand better the content in our own language and maybe provide us more technological material so we can learn better and be more concentrated and interested [69/3°].
1.2. Need more group-work and student-centred learning	27	• It would be good to increase collaboration between students to increase complicity and encourage us to collaborate and learn together [11/2°].
2. Calling for awareness of diversity (15%)
2.1. Need more differentiation	19	• I want to be a doctor, so Combined Sciences is fundamental for my knowledge. But the programme could improve specializations in relation to the specific aptitudes, talents of students because they have different scopes and objectives [73/3°].
2.2. Need more attention to students’ struggles	14	• It is necessary to take into consideration students’ levels of English competence and adapt to their language needs [82/4°].
3. Calling for attention to teacher’s competence (18%)
3.1. Management of classroom, curriculum, etc.	15	• involve students more [42/3°].
3.2. Teacher’s English proficiency	25	• Check teachers’ level of English [97/4°].
4. Calling for changes in school-level organization (11%)
4.1. Re-organization of curriculum	14	• Include other subjects (e.g. history, art, maths) [32/2°].
4.2. Incorporate external exchanges	11	• Speaking with mother tongue students would also favour cultural exchange [95/4°].
5. Reporting positive experiences (23%)
5.1. Improvement with English	22	• The positive aspect of the bilingual programme is that I have started to think in the language, something that I would not have been able to do if not for the teacher [89/4°].
5.2. General personal growth	13	• This programme is significantly helping our bilingualism and is providing us many experiences which help us grow didactically and as individuals [2/2°].
5.3. General positive appraisal	16	• Onestly (sic) I have to say that the programme is functioning well, with the rights teachers and methods to help us studying that subject and let us loving it [72/3°].

Table 4. Example of how appraisals containing multiple thematic issues were treated.

I think the talents each of us has should be valued more (theme 2.1) so we can help others of our group in certain areas (theme 1.2); I would like to do more project work and therefore not only use textbooks but also the IWB to watch videos, PPT presentations, to help us better understand what we are learning (theme 1.1) [18/2°].

Figure 1. Likert ratings given to items in two categories of the ADiBE survey: See text for explanations of how these quantitative survey-results triangulated with students’ appraisals.

Figure 2. A FL/L1-vs.-BICS/CALP Grid clearly delineates the language codes available within a bilingual classroom, all of which can be deployed through translanguaging tasks designed to facilitate content comprehension and the mastery of disciplinary discourse in both students’ L1 and the CLIL-language of instruction (FL).