ISTITUTO PROVINCIALE PER LA RICERCA E LA SPERIMENTAZIONE EDUCATIVA Via Tartarotti 7 -­‐ 38068 Rovereto (TN) Tel. 0461 494500 -­‐ Fax 0461 499266 www.iprase.tn.it -­‐ [email protected]
The European, International, Intercultural and Pluri-Linguistic Component
of Quality in Education: A “Generational” Right to Education
28 settembre 2015
Luciano Covi – Iprase
Discussant for the contributions by Mònica Pereña i Pérez and Brigitte Jörimann
The contributions of both speakers include some aspects that are absolutely relevant
for our Province as well, concerning the intercultural and the multilingualism
components of our local education system. I would like to stress three of these
aspects.
1. I’ll start from the situation of second-generation foreign students, that is students
born in Italy of foreign parents, because, according to national tests on learning, in
our Province (but also in many other Italian regions) second-generation pupils at
primary school (in the second and fifth grade) perform worse than first generation
pupils of their age, both in Italian and maths. This situation is reversed in higher
school levels (lower and upper secondary school).
It’s a strange situation. It seems that in pre-school years, the social and family
background, which is very important for educational processes, is less effective for
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pupils born in Italy compared to pupils who are not born in Italy. Why this happens?
Is it due to language reasons or to cultural reasons, or to other reasons? For example,
how the inclusion process in child cares or nursery schools happen?
2. A second connected aspect regards the importance of expanding the language
diversity, within an intercultural approach, since the early childhood of the pupils.
Neuroscience clearly tells us that multilingualism is a lifetime skill, but it’s better you
have to start learning early, already in the womb.
Jeffrey Kluger, Time, July 29, 2013
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Therefore we have to work a lot in pre-school settings (like child cares, nursery
schools), but also in family settings, for to improve the multilingualism, for to
facilitate the contacts between the mother-tongue and other languages. But yet we
have a problem: we have a fairly good knowledge of what happens (or doesn’t
happen) at school but we know very little about what happens in out-of-school
contexts, especially in social and family ones, which are very important from a
cultural and language viewpoint, for example regarding code-switching which is
used between two or more languages, between one’s mother language and other
languages. In Italy, studies on the inclusion of foreigners focussed a lot on social and
economic aspects and much less on issues related to language aspects, which are very
important.
3. There is a third observation I would like to make after listening to speakers this
morning and it is a question: how much will European education systems be ready to
adopt a multilingual curriculum in a structural way?
I think that they are not really ready, definitely not in Italy. For example, we don’t
know what language skills are learned more solidly when you study at the same time
several languages and how can we establish a multilingual vertical curriculum which
is in line with the development stages of pupils
At the same time, despite the limitation of international and national test, we have a
lot of data about how good our pupils perform in Italian literacy, in maths and science,
but we know virtually nothing about their multilingualism performance. In March of
this year, PISA announced that it would introduce in 2018 a test also for a second
language, but now this idea has been set aside.
In Trentino we have a “Trilingual Plan” which introduces trilingualism curriculum in
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the Education system for the next years. Our Institute is realizing how difficult it is to
test these skills in a general, serious and scientific way. There are very few
international experiences we can refer to. The topic of language assessment involves
more external certification agencies than education systems, that in my opinion aren’t
completely ready for a intercultural curriculum yet.
References
A.A.V.V, Le prove INVALSI nell’Istruzione e Formazione Professionale: esiti,
problematiche e prospettive dopo la prima somministrazione nell’a.s. 2012/13
Working Paper, Iprase, 2015
C. Tamanini, I risultati delle prove Invalsi 2014/2015 in Trentino: le principali
evidenze, Iprase, 2015
INVALSI, Rilevazioni nazionali degli apprendimenti 2014/2015, Luglio 2015
J. Kluger, Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages, Time, April 23,
2013
J. Kluger, The power of the bilingual brain, Time, July 29, 2013
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