Innovation in Methodology and Practice in Language Learning : Experiences and Proposals for University Language Centres [1 ed.] 9781443881531, 9781443880152

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Innovation in Methodology and Practice in Language Learning

Innovation in Methodology and Practice in Language Learning: Experiences and Proposals for University Language Centres Edited by

Christopher Williams

Innovation in Methodology and Practice in Language Learning: Experiences and Proposals for University Language Centres Edited by Christopher Williams This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Williams and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8015-9 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8015-2

CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Carmen Argondizzo Premessa ..................................................................................................... xi Carmen Argondizzo Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Christopher Williams Part One: Three Keynote Addresses Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Language Centres in a Time of Reform: The UK Experience Peter Howarth Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 19 I processi di riforma e le nuove competenze dei docenti Gisella Langé Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 31 Language Centres in CercleS in a ‘Glocal’ European Perspective: A Critical Review of their Materials, Methodologies and Manpower Gillian Mansfield Part Two: Innovative Challenges for Language Centres Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 62 Teaching and Testing Students with SPLDs: Experience from the Venice University Language Centre Claudia D’Este and Geraldine Ludbrook Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 79 Master in International Cooperation: When Language Assessment Faces a Tight Budget Margherita Pelleriti

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 100 Dyslexia and Foreign Language Learning in Italian Primary Schools: Analysis and Evaluation of English Textbooks Selene Rescio Part Three: New Developments in Teaching Language for Specific Purposes Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 116 On Finding an Appropriate Approach to ESAP Teaching Robin Anderson Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 132 Online Case-Brief Banks in ELP Classes: Authenticity, Relevance and Task Design Michela Giordano Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 158 Teacher, Learner and Corpus Linguistics: Cross-Analysing Modality in the Language of Editorials and Developing Writing Skills Luisella Leonzini Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 184 Teaching English for Tourism: A Phraseological and Cultural Approach Elena Manca Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 202 The Passive Voice in Political Speeches: A Corpus-driven Study Denise Milizia Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 230 Assessing the Language Skills of Legal English Learners through Internal and External Testing: The Experience of EFLIT Candidates Anila Scott-Monkhouse Part Four: Proposals and Case Studies in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 250 Insegnare secondo la metodologia CLIL: l’esperienza del ‘corso di perfezionamento’ (20 cfu) Teresina Barbero, Adriana Teresa Damascelli and Marie-Berthe Vittoz

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Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 269 Vehicular English: Oiling the Wheels, Not Building the Engine Rita Bennett Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 289 The Gaps to CLIL: A Case Study Julia Boyd Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 306 Using Multiple Choice to Separate Language Competence from Knowledge and Understanding of Course Content in the Context of CLIL Courses Thomas Christiansen Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 328 International Business and Development Course and CLIL Lois Clegg Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 338 Erfahrungen mit dem CLIL-Unterricht: case-study Finnland Annikki Koskensalo Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 357 CEFR, GMER or OSCE? Investigations into Medical CLIL within a Self-Assessment Framework Anna Loiacono with Cristina Arizzi, Deirdre Kantz, Rosalba Rizzo and Maryellen Toffle Part Five: The Use of New Technologies in Language Learning Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 430 A Summary Writing Course for Language Students in a Personal Learning Environment: PERLE UNICAL Maria Caria, Lis Conde, Michael Cronin and Stefania Firetto Chapter Twenty-One ............................................................................... 445 Les TICE intra et extra-muros stimulant l’apprentissage des langues et sauvegardant l’interaction humaine Isabelle Dotan

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Chapter Twenty-Two............................................................................... 460 Mobile generation e mobile learning: alcuni progetti in Molise Giuliana Fiorentino Chapter Twenty-Three............................................................................. 478 Anytime Anywhere Learning: How Mobile Apps Affect Second Language Learning Sandra Petroni Chapter Twenty-Four .............................................................................. 497 Attività fuori aula e tecnologie ipermediali nella didattica della lingua italiana Anna Toscano Contributors ............................................................................................. 507

FOREWORD CARMEN ARGONDIZZO PRESIDENT OF AICLU

AICLU conferences are occasions for scholars who wish to share ideas about language learning and teaching with the aim of creating new reflective pathways in the fields of research and didactics. Over the years, these AICLU events have gradually become one of the main activities of the Association since they naturally pave the way for the involvement of professionals who wish to talk to each other, exchange ideas and reinforce their own activities on the basis of this communal input. The AICLU Conference, which was held at the University of Foggia from 30 May to 1st June 2013, confirmed these feelings and this vision. It also had an added value since a large number of participants had come from outside Italy, not only from a variety of European countries but also from Algeria, Israel and Tunisia. This generated the opportunity for a three-day collaborative debate which involved the many members of the Italian Association and scholars who, because of their varied working and geographical backgrounds, enriched the conference discussion. This once again highlights AICLU’s willingness to embrace other perspectives in order to promote in-depth reflection on issues related to the well-being and robust development of University Language Centres. This volume is the natural follow-up to the three pleasant days spent in Foggia. Indeed, based on the widespread interest in the field of language learning, Innovation in Methodology and Practice in Language Learning: Experiences and Proposals for University Language Centres offers readers insights into fields such as teaching languages for specific purposes, Content and Language Integrated Learning, and the use of technologies in language learning. These broad study areas, which naturally open up to many other interrelated sub-issues, are central not only because they have favoured important changes in Language Centres but also because they have promoted a meaningful discussion about how languages interweave with other academic disciplines and how innovative technologies can facilitate learning objectives. Moreover, the volume offers reflection on University Language Centres considered from a

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European perspective and beyond, thus providing readers with insights which reinforce the concept of being part of a community of practice that crosses all geographical boundaries. The various contributions, attentively collected by Christopher Williams who has unobtrusively edited them with his personal touch, provide examples of the complexity and flexibility of University Language Centres which, over time, have shown they are subject to a continuous development within the academic world. Moreover, by including papers in different languages, the multilingual aspect of the volume strongly highlights the wide scenario of cultures and communication styles we experience in real life. The volume, which offers reflective reading for students of languages and linguistics as well as professionals who wish to explore new perspectives, is the natural outcome of the activities of a national Association that is willing to approach learning and teaching issues with dynamicity, solid scientific research and a wide-angled perspective which strongly encourages multilingual and multicultural integration in an ongoing process.

PREMESSA CARMEN ARGONDIZZO PRESIDENTE DELL’AICLU

I convegni dell’AICLU costituiscono opportunità per studiosi che desiderano condividere le loro idee circa l’apprendimento e l’insegnamento delle lingue con lo scopo di creare nuovi percorsi di riflessione nella ricerca e nella didattica. Nel tempo, questi eventi AICLU sono diventati una delle attività principali dell’Associazione poiché rappresentano un cammino naturale verso un maggiore coinvolgimento di esperti che desiderano dialogare, scambiare idee ed esperienze e migliorare le proprie attività e competenze grazie a questo input collettivo. L’VIII Convegno Nazionale AICLU, organizzato presso l’Università di Foggia dal 30 maggio al 1° giugno del 2013, ha confermato queste sensazioni e questa visione. Il convegno ha avuto anche un valore aggiunto poiché molti partecipanti provenivano da paesi oltre Italia, non solo europei ma anche da paesi come l’Algeria, Israele e Tunisia. Tutto ciò ha generato, per tre giorni consecutivi, opportunità di dibattito che ha coinvolto i numerosi soci dell’AICLU ed esperti che, in virtù delle loro diverse provenienze accademiche e geografiche, hanno arricchito la discussione scaturita durante il convegno. Questo evidenzia, ancora una volta, la volontà dell’AICLU di volere accogliere altre prospettive con l’obiettivo di promuovere un’approfondita riflessione su temi legati al benessere e allo sviluppo intenso dei Centri Linguistici Universitari. Il volume è una conseguenza naturale di queste tre piacevoli giornate trascorse a Foggia. In realtà, basandosi sull’interesse diffuso nel campo dell’apprendimento delle lingue, Innovation in Methodology and Practice in Language Learning: Experiences and Proposals for University Language Centres offre al lettore una serie di approfondimenti su temi come l’insegnamento delle lingue per scopi specialistici, il CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), e l’uso delle tecnologie nell’apprendimento linguistico. Queste grandi aree tematiche, che si aprono spontaneamente a molti altri argomenti collegati tra di loro, sono centrali non soltanto perché hanno favorito cambiamenti notevoli nei Centri Linguistici, ma anche perché hanno stimolato un dibattito significativo su come l’insegnamento

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delle lingue possa integrarsi ad altre sfere accademiche, e su come le innovazioni tecnologiche possano facilitare gli obiettivi didattici. Inoltre, il volume pone lo sguardo sui Centri Linguistici Universitari considerati attraverso una prospettiva europea ed internazionale, con l’obiettivo di offrire al lettore spunti di riflessione che rafforzino l’idea di essere parte di una comunità che supera qualsiasi confine geografico. I vari contributi, raccolti con cura da Christopher Williams che ha svolto il lavoro di curatore con discrezione e tocco personale, costituiscono testimonianza della complessità e della flessibilità dei Centri Linguistici Universitari i quali, con il trascorrere del tempo, hanno dimostrato di essere oggetto di evoluzione continua all’interno del mondo academico. Inoltre, con l’inclusione di articoli in diverse lingue, l’aspetto plurilingue del volume evidenzia fortemente l’ampio scenario di culture e di stili comunicativi che si incontrano nella vita reale. Il volume, che invita alla riflessione studenti di lingue moderne e studiosi che desiderano esplorare nuove prospettive nella didattica e nella ricerca, è il risultato naturale di un’Associazione nazionale che vuole affrontare tematiche di apprendimento e di insegnamento con dinamicità, con un approccio scientifico consolidato e con una prospettiva ad ampio raggio che privilegia l’integrazione plurilingue e multiculturale in un processo sempre in evoluzione.

INTRODUCTION CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

The 24 papers making up this volume were originally presented in the form of talks at the VIII National Conference of the Associazione Italiana dei Centri Linguistici Universitari (AICLU) held at the University of Foggia, Italy, between 30 May and 1st June 2013. The conference was attended by over 100 participants, about a third of whom came from abroad. Speakers were allowed to present their papers in any of the five major European languages, namely, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. The papers included here represent a selection of the original contributions presented at the conference with a division into five sections as follows: 1 three papers from the conference’s plenary speakers whose talks provided the keynotes for discussion about the various themes explored during the conference; 2 three papers outlining some of the innovative challenges for language centres; 3 six papers discussing the new developments in teaching language for specific purposes; 4 seven papers offering proposals and case studies in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL); 5 five papers illustrating the use of new technologies in language learning. Naturally, there are a number of papers which deal with more than one of the four main theme areas outlined here (sections 2 to 5) but which, for the sake of convenience, have been allotted to just one section. With the exception of the three plenary papers coming from invited speakers, all the other papers were subjected to a double blind refereeing process, with 21 papers being deemed worthy of publication and therefore making it through to the final selection. 18 of the 24 papers in this volume are written in English, four in Italian, one in French and one in German. The

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fact that three-quarters of the papers have been written in English – in many cases by non-native speakers of English – is a reflection of how English has become the lingua franca even in the case of a national (rather than international) conference held in Italy. It therefore seemed logical to write this introduction in English and to provide bio details about the contributors in English in order to reach the widest possible readership. But in keeping with the ethos not only of a national conference held in Italy on language matters relating to university language centres but also of CercleS (Confédération Européenne des Centres de Langues de l’Enseignement Supérieur, the pan-European organisation to which AICLU belongs), which is strongly committed to promoting plurilingualism, it seemed equally crucial to ensure that contributions to this volume would also be accepted in other languages. The conference was privileged to host three distinguished plenary speakers, each an expert in his or her respective field, whose talks constituted an overview of some of the themes explored during the three days of discussion and debate. As Chair (until May 2014) of the Association of University Language Centres for the UK and Ireland, Peter Howarth outlines in his paper some of the recent developments in the rapidly changing role of language centres in the United Kingdom. A renowned expert in the sphere of CLIL, Gisella Langé provides us with an invaluable résumé of the chronology concerning the ongoing implementation of CLIL in Italy’s secondary schools seen from an institutional perspective. And as President of CercleS, the European umbrella association for national university language centres, Gillian Mansfield enlightens us as regards language centre activities across Europe from not just a local but also from a ‘glocal’ perspective. Each of the topics in the second group of papers in this volume examines a very different language teaching situation, but all three represent thought-provoking challenges for language centres in today’s world. Claudia D’Este and Geraldine Ludbrook analyse ways in which university students with certified specific learning disabilities (SpLD) such as dyslexia can improve their foreign language skills, outlining the procedures followed in drawing up an in-house protocol for teaching and assessing English language proficiency at the Venice University Language Centre. In her paper Margherita Pelleriti describes a different type of challenge, but one which is increasingly impinging on the successful running of language courses, namely how university language centres can adapt to providing services on an ever-tighter budget, in this specific case English language assessment in a Master’s degree course at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. The last paper in this section, by Selene

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Rescio, is concerned with the evaluation of a selection of English language course-books for primary school children in Italy from the perspective of how suitable they might be for children who have the learning disability known as development dyslexia. The next group of papers all focus on teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) at university level. Robin Anderson adopts an essentially theoretical approach to his topic by providing a wide-ranging and nuanced historical overview of the development of English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP). Michela Giordano examines ways of using a corpus of US student case briefs in teaching English for Legal Purposes to students as an aid to acquiring “a metacognitive awareness that learners can carry with them into their target professional community”. Luisella Leonzini also employs a corpus-based approach in her discussion of the pedagogical implications of using corpora in language classes in order to improve persuasion-based writing skills by focusing on modality in articles from The Economist. Elena Manca analyses the role of phraseology in language teaching with specific reference to a corpora of texts relating to the world of tourism. She concludes that “University language courses for tourism should also consider the influence that culture has on language and on the way concepts are expressed.” In her corpus-driven study, Denise Milizia focuses on strategies for involving Political Science students in the compilation of corpora of authentic political speeches in English and Italian, with specific reference to the way that passive voice is used across the two languages. Anila R. Scott-Monkhouse looks at how language skills are assessed in a university course on English for Law and International Transactions (EFLIT) with a view to developing learners’ competence in legal English in ways that will prove to be genuinely useful to practitioners in their professional lives. CLIL continues to be a major source of interest, also because it constitutes a relatively new phenomenon impacting on the activities of numerous language centres. In their paper Teresina Barbero, Adriana Teresa Damascelli and Marie-Berthe Vittoz describe the ways in which the so-called ‘CLIL methodological courses’ in Piedmont and Liguria have been organised for secondary school teachers of non-language subjects who wish to become CLIL teachers themselves. The next three papers all refer to CLIL experiments that have taken place at the University of Salento, Italy. Rita Bennett illustrates a case study, including the results of questionnaires, where curriculum courses in English are provided for computer engineering and economics students. She concludes that a more systematic use of English by subject teachers, rather than frequently resorting to Italian, would undoubtedly have beneficial results for the

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students. Julia Boyd analyses the design and implementation of a CLIL course for European Business Law students as well as giving a succinct overview of the aims and philosophy behind CLIL as an innovative learning project. In his paper Thomas Christiansen shows “how it is possible to distinguish between linguistic performance and knowledge of content in simple L2 multiple choice tests.” However, he affirms that “CLIL by its dual focus presents many challenges not only to teachers but also to testers.” Lois Clegg describes the language work carried out on a degree course in International Business and Development (IBD) delivered in English at the University of Parma. Her conclusion is that “increased collaboration between subject and language experts is important” in order to ensure the successful implementation of CLIL. Annikki Koskensalo, Emerita professor from the University of Turku, offers insights into the ways CLIL has been taught in Finland, contextualising her study by looking at some of the problems related to how CLIL should itself be defined. The final offering in this section is from Anna Loiacono with Cristina Arizzi, Deirdre Kantz, Rosalba Rizzo and Maryellen Toffle who investigate into Medical CLIL within a self-assessment framework. Their findings are the result of a workshop held at the conference in Foggia devoted entirely to Medical CLIL, and their contribution is hence much longer than any of the others in this volume, being the equivalent of three papers rolled into one. One of the leitmotifs running through this chapter is the importance of imparting intercultural medical competence in this globalised world. The final section is devoted to the use of new technologies in language learning. In their paper Maria Caria, Lis Conde, Michael Cronin and Stefania Firetto describe the way they have set up a summary writing course for language students in an open source online personal learning environment (PerLE) at the University of Calabria demonstrating “the efficacy of a dynamic assembly approach in the creation of e-courses using reusable learning objects.” Isabelle Dotan, from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, focuses on how so-called TICE (Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication dans l’Enseignement) can be successfully employed in foreign language teaching, both intra-muros and extra-muros. In her paper Giuliana Fiorentino discusses a project called SIMOLA (Simulated Mobile Language Learning) undertaken at the University of Molise in Italy which aims at exploiting ways of using mobile phones as a means of learning a foreign language. The next paper, by Sandra Petroni, continues with the theme of m-learning, but this time with the focus on a comparative evaluation of the various apps available for mobile phones in the field of second language learning. She concludes that a reassessment is

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needed as to “how courses and learning objects are designed for mobile devices in order to exploit their full potential.” The final paper in this volume, by Anna Toscano, is about a hypermedia project carried out at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice for learners of Italian as L2 where language learning processes are developed through the use of new technology, in this case multimedia resources exploring the city of Venice from a plurality of perspectives. This brief overview of the 24 chapters comprising the volume clearly illustrates the variety of approaches and perspectives relating to how university language centres operate in and adapt to this rapidly changing world. As editor of this volume I have tried to allow the author(s) of each chapter to express their individuality, also in terms of spelling conventions. Hence minor differences in spelling may be discernible (e.g. organization / organisation) in a few of the chapters. However, taken as a whole, the volume constitutes a coherent body of contributions, each focusing in its own way on the theme of innovation in methodology and practice in language learning from the perspective of university language centres. It is hoped that readers will enjoy this selection of papers and that the volume will be of genuine interest to all the stakeholders in university language education. I would like to thank both Maurizio Gotti, President of AICLU up to the time of the conference in Foggia, and Carmen Argondizzo, the current President of AICLU, together with the other members of the Direttivo, for their support and encouragement in putting this volume together. Finally, I wish to thank a number of colleagues for their invaluable help in the preparatory stages of this volume which ensured that the contents were of the highest possible standards: Geneviève Abet, Carmen Argondizzo, Fiona Dalziel, Daniela Forapani, Christoph Nickenig, Claudio Vinti, Michel Van Der Yeught, and Elisabeth Wielander. Foggia, June 2015

PART ONE: THREE KEYNOTE ADDRESSES

CHAPTER ONE LANGUAGE CENTRES IN A TIME OF REFORM: THE UK EXPERIENCE PETER HOWARTH UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS, UK

Introduction It is common for foreign language learning in the UK to be painted in a rather negative light. The stereotype of a predominantly monolingual population persists and in some respects is being reinforced, both as a result of the precarious position of modern foreign language (MFL) learning at school level and also the decline in take-up of foreign languages at degree level. Without going into the complexities of this state of affairs (and not all of the impressions are accurate), I would like to describe the role that university language centres play in promoting foreign language learning, in the face of apparently considerable odds. I would like to suggest that this role might be of general relevance, in particular in the relationships between language centres and academic departments of languages in universities. I will report on some major projects in the UK in response to the perceived struggle in promoting foreign language learning, and will focus on the position of language centres in these initiatives. A recent survey of institutions (UCML/AULC 2012) gives some useful quantitative data and reports some significant opinions of language centre managers. I would like to suggest ways in which language centres, in the UK at least, might position themselves more strongly to cope with present and future pressures.

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Context To begin with some background, I will describe the specific context in which language centres work locally in the UK and how they are organised and supported nationally. Where most relevant, examples will be taken from the University of Leeds. Language centres in the UK are very diverse in their structure, size and location, providing a range of taught courses and services. They may be free-standing operations, (perhaps described as a central service, ‘Languages for All’ or Institution-Wide Language Programme (IWLP)). Alternatively, they may be situated within a School of Modern Languages, Lifelong Learning, Communication Studies, a Business school, European Studies or Area Studies. In Leeds it is a department within the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, which is recognised as the largest such school in the UK. It consists of 11 subject areas, ranging from the academic study of all major European languages, Arabic and East Asian studies, Linguistics and Phonetics, Translation and Interpreting and World Cinemas. While fully integrated into the School, the Language Centre is the only non-academic unit in that it does not offer its own degree programmes. This status is not unusual. Language centres are often somewhat hybrid operations: part teaching, part service unit. In common with several of the largest centres in the UK, the Leeds centre is organised in three sections, each with a separate source of funding. Firstly, and in Leeds the largest in size, is the teaching of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which is chiefly funded from fees paid by international students, the level of which is determined by the Language Centre. This section has the largest number of students and staff and requires the greatest resources, in terms of administrative support, space etc. Secondly, the teaching of foreign languages (about 10-12 in Leeds) on credit-bearing ‘elective modules’ is largely provided by part-time staff and funded by a percentage of the students’ University tuition fees. These students are mostly UK/EU undergraduates (though international students also enrol), and could be studying degree programmes in any of the University’s faculties. Thirdly, the Centre provides language learning facilities for independent study for all students and staff, a language learning advice service, a language exchange scheme and technological infrastructure (including multilingual TV, language laboratories and other classroom equipment). All of this is funded by a central grant from the University.

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National support The Association of University Language Centres (AULC) was set up in 1999 to represent language centres or similar institutions in the UK and Republic of Ireland. It currently has a membership of 76: England 58, Scotland 4, Wales 2, Northern Ireland 2, Republic of Ireland 8 and two others: West Indies and the Foreign Office Language Centre. This total number is fairly stable, though it is a somewhat shifting population, with a few members leaving (or disappearing) each year, others returning under new management or being created. As with other national associations its main function is the support of members. A significant characteristic is that its active membership covers all professional interests: those of language teachers, managers and technical and resources staff. As these institutions range from the largest (Manchester, Leeds, London universities such as the London School of Economics, University College and King’s College, etc.) to the smallest resource centres, mutual assistance is very beneficial, especially for those setting up from scratch or being re-established, or those under threat from university managements who struggle to see the value of language learning. In these cases the Association is able to lobby in support of a member, though not always with success. Support is provided through an active email discussion list, especially for technology and resources, and an annual conference, which attempts a good balance in serving the interests of its wide range of members. The languages professions in the UK benefit nationally from the leadership of two bodies. The first is UCML (University Council of Modern Languages), the umbrella organisation for all learned societies and subject associations in the languages field in the UK. This works hard in lobbying for languages and in promoting collaboration through projects. The other, the Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies (LLAS), is also able to raise the profile of languages nationally. AULC is a constituent member of the European confederation, CercleS, which brings together 12 national associations, totalling over 300 individual centres, with associate members in a further 14 countries. CercleS provides support to its members through conferences and workshops, through focus groups on specific topics such as translation or events management. It also promotes quality in learning and teaching through such mechanisms as the European Language Portfolio. The twiceyearly journal (CercleS/de Gruyter), Language Learning in Higher Education, is free to members. Through CercleS, an annual meeting of language centre directors has been held in eastern Germany (Wulkow) for

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the last five years, producing memoranda on quality assurance and other key issues.

Threats to language studies This is the framework within which language centres work, and, in spite of the extensive support and promotional networks, languages in the UK are perceived to be under threat. They have had official government designation as a ‘Strategically Important and Vulnerable’ subject, which has attracted special support, but language studies in higher education are still influenced by the following factors.

Funding The introduction in 2012 of yet higher levels of tuition fees, advertised and debated well in advance, provoked a strong reaction. By the time the details were known and explained (i.e. no up-front payment) all headlines concentrated on the large debts that students would have accumulated on graduation. As a result, applications, especially in the arts and humanities, were predicted to fall, but the main effect has possibly been to increase doubt over future student behaviour and to make planning much more difficult and time-consuming (staffing, types of course to offer, resources etc.). Other factors affecting language programmes particularly include the status of languages in the primary and secondary curriculum and funding for residence abroad. There are conflicting pressures on universities such as the requirement to improve access for students from less privileged backgrounds, while school-level language learning is increasingly concentrated in independent, fee-paying schools, and at degree level in fewer research-intensive, ‘elite’ universities.

International recruitment A further very damaging factor making management (of whole institutions but language centres involved in EAP in particular) more difficult has been the policy of the government towards visa applications from international students. While, on the one hand, universities are encouraged to expand their income from international students, the impression is given that the country is unwelcoming to foreign students, stated explicitly by a government minister, and the constant changes in regulations cause an enormous and almost unmanageable administrative workload for admissions staff. Language centres are in the frontline in this

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process, admitting students in advance of their entry into the normal university procedures.

Privatisation Privatisation of EAP has also been seen as a threat to some language centres, indicative of university managements’ attitude to international student recruitment and the government’s policy of privatising public services. There are those who believe that academic departments should become more responsive to market forces, but the full implications of such changes are often not appreciated. There is great concern (led by trades unions) over ‘commodification’ and ‘marketisation’ of higher education, and EAP has been at the forefront of these developments.

Lobbying power A further concern is over the relative weakness of languages, and other humanities subjects in influencing government policy. BIS (the government’s Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, which has responsibility for higher education) have experience of engineers, scientists and medical schools demanding investment (essential for the UK economy). The arts and humanities appear not to take that kind of direct approach.

Responses In the last few years (especially since 2009) there have been attempts to break out of this cycle. A major impetus was provided by Professor Michael Worton (vice-provost of University College, London) in 2009, who was asked to conduct a ‘Review of Modern Foreign Languages provision in higher education in England’ (Worton 2009). It was restricted to England because the commission came from the government HE funding council for England (HEFCE). Rather than just lamenting and detailing the dire state of languages, Worton identified some of the root causes of weakness within university language departments themselves and made some criticisms, some of which were hard-hitting. The main point of the report is that until such departments could define what they are, promote themselves as a coherent body of teaching and research of value to society (as other disciplines do) and work together, they should not expect further special government consideration. There has been a

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tendency of parochial interest in narrow areas of research, which has not made enough reference to the wider discipline.

Language Centres and academic departments of languages This review proved an excellent opportunity for language centres to explain what they do and what is distinctive about their activities. The report was one of the first to give language centres equal status with academic departments in universities, which have had most attention in past analyses of languages in HE. Worton described the relationship between the two types of operation in the following ways: the relationship between Language Centres/IWLPs and the Modern Language Departments is often an uneasy one, with the Language Centres often being perceived by the MFL Departments as mere service providers of ‘everyday’ language learning. (Worton 2009: 26) there was some anxiety amongst a group of respondents about the profile of Language Centres and the extent to which they represented a threat to the status of the academic Departments … (who define themselves as teaching language through content and culture). (Worton 2009: 29)

(A more detailed examination of this relationship between academic departments of modern languages and language centres can be found in Howarth 2010). In the wake of the Worton report there was considerable activity with a variety of fora (for example, The Worton Forum), meetings at the British Academy, HEFCE and BIS. Among the most tangible results of this activity have been two funded projects.

‘Shaping the Future of Languages in HE’ This is the most significant development among the post-Worton activities. Described as a ‘Toolkit’, this public website is a repository for documents of various kinds, available for the language profession to use chiefly for their own internal lobbying purposes, to inform and persuade their own universities’ senior managements of the value of their disciplines. The resources currently consist of over 40 documents in the form of case studies, reports, spreadsheets and presentations and are organised under three headings:

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Chapter One

1. identity: “Towards a shared sense of purpose within a diverse and changing field” 2. internationalisation: “Ideas and examples of ways in which languages can actively engage with the institution’s internationalisation agenda” 3. employability: “Research data and practical tools for supporting the development of employability skills for language graduates.” Collectively, they make a strong case to the non-specialist decisionmaker in our institutions that we should be valued. While the second and third themes have a clear motivation and fit with most universities’ strategic visions, the first was included because of the perceived lack of coherence within the profession. While the public knows what the core content of most disciplines is, it was felt that language-related studies are too diverse to be easily understood by outsiders.

Example 1: shared identity The following is a list of titles of typical research publications in academic departments of languages: The Algerian demonstrations of 1961 and their repression The History of the French Language in Russia The G8 and G20’s position in global governance and the role of Japan Cultural Literacy in Contemporary Europe: A European-wide project Maintaining a regional language in the 21st century: the example of Low German Learning French from ages 5, 7 and 11: An investigation into starting ages, rates and routes of learning amongst early foreign language learners Dante and Theology Documenting varieties of the Romani language German Autobiographical Writing in the Twentieth Century Russian Media, Culture, and Conceptual Blending Queer Cinema from Spain and France: the translation of desire and the formation of transnational queer identities (UCML 2011a) How can this collection of subject areas be recognised as a single discipline, rather than as individual, disparate, pieces of research? Unless we can define what we do, we cannot expect others to appreciate it. The

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argument on the other hand points out that this is what academics are employed to study, teach and write about (and they are encouraged to be cross-disciplinary and serendipitous in finding research partners and funding), and one should not pretend it is something different. The conflict between the protection of academic freedom and pressures towards standardisation can appear quite stark.

Example 2: internationalisation Many university managements in the UK have created internationalisation strategies, and the benefits of this approach to the curriculum have been identified as follows: x Students display an ability to think globally and consider issues from a variety of perspectives; x They demonstrate an awareness of their own culture and its perspectives and other cultures and their perspectives; x They appreciate the relation between their field of study locally and professional traditions elsewhere; x They recognise intercultural issues relevant to their professional practice; x They appreciate the importance of multicultural diversity to professional practice and citizenship; x They appreciate the complex and interacting factors that contribute to notions of culture and cultural relationships; x They value diversity of language and culture; x They appreciate and demonstrate the capacity to apply international standards and practices within the discipline or professional area; x They demonstrate awareness of the implications of local decisions and actions for international communities and of international decisions and actions for local communities. (UCML 2011b)

Example 3: employability Another example, which AULC contributed to the Employability section, is titled “Working collaboratively with non-language departments.” Whereas most collaboration engaged in by academic departments of languages is with other humanities disciplines (French with History, for example), language centres find it easier to form partnerships with nonhumanities departments. This example gives some case studies of work

10

Chapter One

with Engineering (French for the Aerospace Industry) and Medicine (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Punjabi for medical students). This highlights the large amount of collaborative activity between languages and STEM(M) subjects. These are the officially designated disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (with Medicine sometimes added) which receive protected government funding. They make attractive partners, as they are sharply focused on their students’ future careers and have a strong interest in applied languages. (UCML: 2011c)

‘Speak to the Future’ This five-year campaign (http://www.speaktothefuture.org/) was launched in 2011 with objectives for five levels of UK language use: 1. Every language valued as an asset 2. A coherent experience of languages for all children in primary school 3. A basic working knowledge of at least two languages including English for every child leaving secondary school 4. Every graduate qualified in a second language 5. An increase in the number of highly qualified linguists. The objectives of most interest to language centres are 4 and 5. Language centres have mounted a number of Festivals of Languages on Mardi Gras to promote languages in schools, the public, the press and on their own campuses. Objective 4 has more chance of being realised in the medium term, as there are mechanisms for promoting language learning in HE that do not depend on what pupils have done at school or on recruitment into departments of modern languages. Language centres are well placed to fulfil demand for ab initio language learning and to respond to their institutions’ language policies. The British Academy (the government-funded body that supports the humanities and social sciences) is a major champion of languages in HE. One of its main concerns, detailed in a number of recent reports (Language Matters, Language Matters More and More and Languages: The State of the Nation), is the low level of language skills possessed by British researchers in the humanities, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison with their international competitors. Funding has been offered to help repair this deficit, through short-term specialist training, such as developing reading skills in foreign languages. A problem with many

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reports is that they identify the need for language skills (e.g. in business), and the fact that employers lament this deficiency, but businesses do not seem to back this up with either adequate training on the job or requirements on prospective employees to have these skills. So the situation is more complex than it seems.

UCML/AULC survey of IWLPs Any effective lobbying, especially if funding is being sought, has to include facts and figures. For language centres it is particularly difficult to acquire data, even for the basic overall numbers of language learners in our institutions, as these are not included in the national HE statistics, because many of our activities do not fit into standard degree programmes and their component modules. In order to collect these and the more useful qualitative data on languages and levels offered and the specific experiences of language centre managers, it is necessary to conduct our own surveys. The latest survey (conducted in Autumn 2012 and reported in 2013) was an attempt at setting up a regular annual exercise in collecting relevant data. 62 language centres (or equivalent institutions) responded, reporting a total of 50,000 students registered on IWLPs. This number excludes those learning English as a foreign language in language centres. This demonstrates that, purely in simple totals, such forms of learning are not a minority activity in comparison with students on single or joint honours degree programmes. Although previous surveys over the last 10 years have focused on similar activities, it is hard to make direct historical comparisons. However, a few trends are clear. The most obvious is a shift in relative popularity between the traditional European languages and the languages of the Middle East and East Asia. In 2001 French was taught in 49 institutions, Italian in 27, Chinese in only 9 and Arabic in 2. In 2012 French and Italian had grown in breadth of coverage, as the total number of LCs has expanded (55 and 47, respectively) but Chinese and Arabic are now no longer exotic minority languages and have become mainstream (taught in 48 and 43 institutions, respectively), thus achieving parity of visibility. The percentage of IWLP students taking these languages also reflects this trend. In 2001 students of French accounted for 34% of all IWLP students, Italian 8%, Chinese only 0.7% and Arabic a miniscule 0.06%. By 2012 French has declined to 25%, Italian remains at 8%, while Chinese has risen to 8% and Arabic by almost a hundred times to 5%. Some quotes from language centre managers support this generally buoyant outlook.

12

Chapter One “The provision of languages is seen as an important part of the institution’s employability agenda and internationalisation agendas.” “There are strong institutional initiatives to develop employability, and language skills feature prominently in this context and enjoy institutional support.” “On a number of occasions senior officers of the University (Vice Chancellor and others) stressed the importance of such provision for the institution.” “Many students see language learning as an important part of their professional development, a trend that seems to be growing. There has definitely been growing awareness regarding the necessity of foreign languages over the last years.” (UCML/AULC 2013)

To readers from other parts of Europe, these comments may appear unexceptional, making points that they would take for granted. However, amidst gloom in some of the foreign languages professions in UK HE, they may stand out for their optimism.

Opportunities and trends Looking at ways in which language centres can contribute to language learning in HE, a few possible developments can be identified.

Demand While there appears to be some healthy growth in student numbers on IWLPs, knowing what future demand will be in terms of languages and levels is difficult. The British Academy’s State of the Nation report (2013) identifies Turkish, Farsi and Polish as languages responding to “new economic realities”. The more serious question is not so much what the languages of the future will be but how can university departments be organised in order to identify and then respond to demand. Language centres often find it easier to produce a rapid response to new interests, since they simply need to employ a tutor and find a classroom, and any investment is low-risk. They may work with academic departments of languages to provide a principled response and division of labour. For example, some languages and levels (e.g. ab initio Spanish) may be easier

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for IWLPs to provide, while others may fit better with academic departments’ specialisations (e.g. Farsi in a department of Arabic). There may be greater opportunities for collaboration between LCs and non-humanities faculties or STEMM subjects (medicine, business, engineering), who may be well placed to identify the needs of their students. However, there may be more short-term interests rather than longer-term trends in students’ choices of what to study. For example, Brazilian Portuguese may be worth offering in the light of cultural or sporting events giving that country a high profile. Another case is the growing interest in Korean, which many language centres are responding to, though whether this will be a sustained interest or a temporary fashion is hard to tell. In either case language centres can meet the need.

Fees At this stage in their introduction it is not yet clear what effect higher student fees will have on student numbers in the humanities. It is also possible that fees will either rise further or be reduced in some universities as a market develops. Language centres may not be adversely affected, as many of their IWLP students come from financially protected STEMM disciplines. One way in which the market may work in their favour can be seen with some universities trying to attract students with the offer of ‘free’ language courses for all.

International students Many language centres, though not all, combine the teaching of foreign languages to mostly UK students with the teaching of English for academic purposes to international students. This activity provides essential induction to university life as well as the study skills training and academic language required. It is very difficult for universities not to see these students as a source of income replacing central government funding and there is intense and growing competition for these students. This competition is, of course, not only national, as other countries in Europe and elsewhere offer attractive opportunities for the same students. The challenge facing UK universities is to ensure that they are given the “goldplated” student experience claimed for UK students. An additional factor is international students’ increasing interest in learning a (3rd or 4th) foreign language while in the UK by joining an IWLP. This seems to be a very positive aspect of internationalisation.

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Curriculum review In response to concerns about the appropriateness of what they provide for their students, especially in the light of high tuition fees, many universities have embarked on reviews of their curricula, in order to make student choices more coherent and relevant. This can be summed up as redefining “graduateness” for employment. One example of this approach involves three Core Threads, which must receive explicit reference in all undergraduate degree programmes, with a description of how each programme of study will treat one or more of these themes: “Ethics and Responsibility”, “Global and Cultural Insight” and “Employability”. Clearly, the second is an opportunity to highlight intercultural communication with some recognition of the part played by language. In addition, the way in which elective modules (freely chosen for credit by students outside their main degree subject) are presented and organised has been revised in the same institution with the same motivation, to address the problem of a rather random selection by students risking an incoherent academic experience. All of the hundreds of elective modules have been grouped into 10 Discovery Themes, one of which is “Languages and Cross-Cultural Understanding”. These groupings are designed to maintain flexibility but also provide clearer progression through academic levels and a more rational approach to selection. There will also be increased promotion of Study Abroad opportunities, and it is hoped that these various initiatives, developing throughout the country, will improve the visibility of languages.

Joint honours degrees These degree programmes have been a very popular way of combining the study of two areas of interest, and those with a language, or of two languages, have attracted the largest number of students, many more, in Leeds, than those taking a single honours language degree. Due to their popularity, these combinations have proliferated to an almost unmanageable extent. In order, again, to make student choice more principled, the more than 300 individual named degrees (for example, BA in Arabic/Chinese etc. and International Development/Relations) have been reduced to 17 programmes (for example, BA in Modern Languages and World Cinemas). To ensure greater coherence, each combination includes a compulsory Cornerstone Module, designed to tie together the two halves of each programme. Depending on the programme, students study one of these seven modules: Introduction to Audio-Visual Cultures;

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Language, Structure and Sound; World Histories; Discourse, Culture and Identity; Intercultural Competence: Theory and Application; Politics, Culture and Society; World Literatures. These reflect the breadth of subjects covered by those joint honours programmes which include a language.

Language policy Major attempts to raise the profile of language study and recruitment onto degree programmes in HE have targeted school pupils through a range of initiatives. While schools welcome these approaches, some of them express the view that universities should do more themselves to demonstrate that they take language skills seriously. Responses have appeared in two forms. One has been to offer all students a “free” language course in addition to their main degree programme. The other, a genuine language policy, has been introduced at University College London, which states the following objective: UCL encourages intercultural awareness in all its students, and considers experience of learning a foreign language a vital element of a broad and balanced education. UCL wishes to ensure that all of our graduates have had some experience of exploring another culture through language.

This aim will be met by requiring UK students who do not have a GCSE grade C or equivalent in a foreign language (other than Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew or Latin) on admission to UCL ... to acquire an equivalent level of language proficiency once they are enrolled with us. This will either be through participation in a UCL summer school, study for a specially designed certificate at the UCL Centre for Languages & International Education, or by taking a 0.5 CU (course-unit) course in a language as part of their degree programme. (University College London 2013)

It is hoped that this very prominent initiative might spread through HE, perhaps in the spirit of institutional competition that has developed over the last 20 years. One of the obstacles to promoting language learning in the education system is that there appears to be a single, undifferentiated objective at all levels: to learn a foreign language to the best of one’s ability. This can seem daunting, especially within the traditional British approach, which has fostered inhibitions against speaking until one can produce a good

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Chapter One

accent and fairly proficient grammatical accuracy. A more positive approach might clearly differentiate the motivation for language learning at various levels: Primary school: language as a natural part of the syllabus, learnt for fun, with taster sessions in a range of languages. In multicultural schools children can use a few words of their friends’ own language. They learn about language rather than languages. Secondary school: pupils learn that languages provide access to other cultures. A degree of plurilingualism is part of being a European or world citizen. Foreign language proficiency is a requirement for entry into university and a major enrichment of travel. Tertiary level proficiency in one or more languages is an essential attribute of graduateness. It is a major advantage for employment: for example, German for automotive engineering, Chinese for business, French for medical NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières. We need to “reframe languages as a cross-curriculum skill for all abilities, levels and disciplines” (Coleman 2013).

Internationalisation The internationalisation strategies produced by universities in recent years have in some cases focused too much on the twin financial aims of increasing international student recruitment and fostering international research collaboration. There has been less emphasis on the internationalisation of the campus and the benefits for all students: 1. Many students from the UK arrive at university from a wide range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, though they are treated as monolingual English-speaking and culturally homogeneous. 2. There are many opportunities for UK students to travel on residence or study abroad programmes, including work placements. Though under-used, these have been described by participants as life-changing experiences. To make best use of these opportunities, language skills training should be made very widely available. 3. International students from almost all countries in the world study in UK universities, bringing their languages, cultures and outlooks on life. While language centres encourage language exchange partnerships, much more could be made of this feature of university life. Such campus diversity can be seen as an attraction to all students, UK, EU and international.

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4. In increasing numbers students from all parts of the world are taking up the opportunities offered by language centres and IWLPs to acquire proficiency in additional languages while in the UK. True internationalisation in UK higher education involves the interaction of these elements, incorporating language learning and use into campus life, recognizing explicitly the multi-cultural, international environment, encouraging cross-cultural communication and developing curricula to achieve this.

Conclusion While the stereotype of relatively low foreign language learning activity in the UK is not entirely inaccurate and there is a major challenge for policy makers, it should be recognised that the situation is complex. There are major attempts to promote and stimulate the learning of languages, and in some quarters there are positive signs, especially in university language centres. I believe that the UK is not alone in struggling to respond to globalisation, to provide their students with those skills currently in demand and to adapt rapidly to changing circumstances. I feel that the UK can learn a great deal from institutions in other parts of Europe, by acknowledging that some of these issues are shared and by making use of the extensive networks available.

References British Academy 2013. The State of the Nation. At http://www.britac.ac.uk/policy/State_of_the_Nation_2013.cfm. Cable V. 2013. International students do not feel welcome in Britain. The Guardian September 17th 2013. At http://www.theguardian.com/higher-educationnetwork/2013/sep/17/vince-cable-international-students-not-welcome. Coleman J. 2013. A strategic contextual overview of university modern languages. Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies. At https://www.llas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/nodes/6700/Jim_Coleman_lan guages_overview.ppt. Howarth P. 2010. The relationship between academic departments of modern languages and language centres. At http://www.aulc.org/documents/academic.doc. University College London 2013. Undergraduate Entry Requirements. At

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http://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/undergraduatestudy/application-and-entry/ug-requirements. University Council for Modern Languages 2011a. What is modern languages research? At http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/shapingthefuture/100/19%20%20research_pam%20moores.pdf. University Council for Modern Languages 2011b. Curriculum development through international collaboration. At http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/shapingthefuture/102/1%20% 20Roger%20woods%20inter%20resource%20template%20COMPLET ED_0.pdf. University Council for Modern Languages 2011c. Working collaboratively with non-academic departments. At http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/shapingthefuture/101/23%20 %20Peter%20Howarth%20emp%20inter%20resource%20template.pdf. University Council for Modern Languages/Association of University Language Centres 2013.Survey of IWLPs in universities in the UK (2012-13). At http://www.aulc.org/documents/UCML_AULC.docx. Worton M. 2009. Review of Modern Foreign Languages Provision in Higher Education in England. At http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2009/200941/.

CHAPTER TWO I PROCESSI DI RIFORMA E LE NUOVE COMPETENZE DEI DOCENTI

GISELLA LANGÉ MINISTRY OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY AND RESEARCH, ITALY

Premessa Numerosi regolamenti, indicazioni e norme approvati dal 2010 stanno dando un nuovo assetto al sistema di istruzione e formazione italiano. Con la messa in atto dei nuovi Regolamenti per licei, istituti professionali e tecnici, a partire dall’anno scolastico 2010/11 è stata avviata la Riforma nelle scuole secondarie di secondo grado, mentre a partire dal 2012/13 è stato attivato nelle Università il nuovo sistema di formazione iniziale dei docenti che prevede, dopo la laurea triennale e la laurea magistrale, un sesto anno “abilitante” a numero chiuso, denominato “Tirocinio Formativo Attivo” (TFA). L’elemento di vero interesse è costituito dalle nuove competenze linguistico-comunicative richieste a tutti i futuri docenti, che dovranno essere in possesso di “valutazione o certificazione” di competenze linguistiche in lingua inglese di livello B2 del Quadro Comune Europeo di Riferimento per le lingue del Consiglio d’Europa per conseguire l’abilitazione per le scuole di ogni ordine e grado. Una certezza: chiunque voglia intraprendere questa professione sia nelle scuole dell’infanzia/primaria sia nella secondaria di primo/secondo grado dovrà conoscere la lingua inglese a livello B2. Se in passato era possibile insegnare, ad esempio, Matematica senza possedere la conoscenza dell’inglese, ora non lo è più. Si tratta di una scelta “forte”, utile ad allineare i futuri insegnanti alle competenze chiave di cittadinanza e ai percorsi formativi definiti dalla normativa europea. Altro aspetto di grande interesse: la Legge 53/2003 e vari Regolamenti hanno reso obbligatorio l’insegnamento di una disciplina non linguistica in

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Chapter Two

lingua straniera sia negli ultimi anni dei Licei e degli Istituti Tecnici sia a partire dal terzo anno nei Licei Linguistici. Per i futuri docenti DNL (meglio conosciuti come docenti CLIL) è richiesta la frequenza ad un “Corso di perfezionamento” organizzato dalle Università, che prevede come prerequisiti per l’accesso il possesso sia dell’abilitazione all’insegnamento sia di una competenza linguistica di Livello C1 certificata. Questo contributo intende mettere a fuoco lo stato dell’arte sia delle Riforme in atto nelle scuole secondarie di secondo grado sia delle modalità con le quali sono stati avviati i Corsi CLIL presso strutture universitarie (ad esempio i Centri Linguistici di Ateneo) per lo sviluppo delle competenze sia linguistico-comunicative sia metodologico-didattiche. Particolare attenzione viene data ai nuovi bisogni di sviluppo professionale dei docenti in servizio, alle modalità di formazione blended sperimentate e alle nuove comunità di pratica che si sono sviluppate.

La formazione dei docenti di una disciplina non linguistica (DNL) in lingua straniera nei licei e istituti tecnici Il contesto normativo Le modalità organizzative di percorsi CLIL, attivati in assoluta autonomia e su base volontaria in molte scuole italiane a partire dal 2000, sono state istituzionalizzate dalla Legge 53/2003 e dai Regolamenti per i Licei e per gli Istituti Tecnici (Decreti del Presidente della Repubblica del 15 marzo 2010) che hanno reso obbligatorio l’insegnamento in lingua straniera di una materia nell’ultimo anno dei Licei e degli Istituti Tecnici e di due materie in due lingue straniere diverse a partire dalle classi terze e quarte dei Licei Linguistici. Quali le materie da veicolare in lingua straniera? La scelta per i Licei è lasciata alle scuole: Storia, Storia dell’arte, Filosofia, Matematica, Fisica, Chimica, Scienze naturali, Scienze motorie possono essere insegnate in una lingua straniera. Negli Istituti Tecnici la scelta è solo in ambito di Materie Tecniche, da insegnare in lingua inglese. La forte decisione politica ha richiesto un lungo processo di procedimenti normativi e un adeguamento dei percorsi di sviluppo professionale dei docenti, affrontato dall’Amministrazione in ambito sia di formazione iniziale sia di formazione in servizio, riassunti nella seguente Figura 1.

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Figura 1 CLIL: regolamenti e decreti 15 Marzo 2010

7 Ottobre 2010

Regolamenti

INDICA ZIONI Nazionali Licei

Nuovi Licei & Istituti Tecnici e Professio nali

30 Sett 2011

10 Sett 2010

Regolamento Formazione iniziale docenti

Linee Guida Istituti Tecnici e Professionali

Decreto Criteri e modalità attivazione Corsi CLIL di 60 crediti

7 Mar 2012

Decreto sulle Certifica zioni

16 aprile 2012

Decreto Direttoriale Corsi CLIL 20 crediti per docenti in servizio

settembre 2012

INDICAZIONI Nazionali Infanzia e Primo ciclo

Gisella Langé 2015 Gisella Langé

La formazione iniziale Il Regolamento per la formazione iniziale dei docenti, predisposto nell’agosto 2010 e approvato in forma definitiva nel gennaio 2011, prevede la frequenza a un “Corso di perfezionamento per l’insegnamento di una disciplina non linguistica in lingua straniera” organizzato dalle Università. Requisiti di accesso sono il possesso di abilitazione in una disciplina non linguistica e di competenze certificate nella lingua straniera almeno di livello C1 del Quadro Comune Europeo di Riferimento per le lingue del Consiglio d'Europa. Un dettagliato "Profilo del docente CLIL" è previsto quale risultato di un percorso formativo articolato in 60 crediti formativi, comprensivi di un tirocinio di almeno 300 ore, pari a 12 crediti formativi universitari.

La formazione dei docenti in servizio Per i docenti in servizio, quanto previsto dal Regolamento per i neodocenti è stato declinato da un Decreto Direttoriale datato 16 Aprile 2012

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che propone un corso di perfezionamento metodologico-didattico realizzato da strutture universitarie per un totale di 20 CFU. Il "Profilo" previsto al termine del percorso si articola negli ambiti linguistico, disciplinare e metodologico-didattico (vedi i descrittori della Figura 3) e mette in particolare risalto il fatto che “il docente CLIL deve essere in grado di progettare percorsi CLIL in sinergia con i docenti di lingua straniera e/o di altre discipline.” Figura 2

Ambito linguistico: x ha una competenza di livello C1 nella lingua straniera x ha competenze linguistiche adeguate alla gestione di materiali disciplinari in lingua straniera x ha una padronanza della microlingua disciplinare (lessico specifico, tipologie di discorso, generi e forme testuali) e sa trattare nozioni e concetti disciplinari in lingua straniera. Ambito disciplinare: x è in grado di utilizzare i saperi disciplinari in coerenza con la dimensione formativa proposta dai curricula delle materie relative al proprio ordine di scuola x è in grado di trasporre in chiave didattica i saperi disciplinari integrando lingua e contenuti. Ambito metodologico-didattico: x è in grado di progettare percorsi CLIL in sinergia con i docenti di lingua straniera e/o di altre discipline x è in grado di reperire, scegliere, adattare, creare materiali e risorse didattiche per ottimizzare la lezione CLIL, utilizzando anche le risorse tecnologiche e informatiche x è in grado di realizzare autonomamente un percorso CLIL, impiegando metodologie e strategie finalizzate a favorire l’apprendimento attraverso la lingua straniera x è in grado di elaborare e utilizzare sistemi e strumenti di valutazione condivisi e integrati, coerenti con la metodologia CLIL. Una Circolare del MIUR, Direzione Generale del Personale del 9 dicembre 2010, prot. 10872, ha avviato “le attività per la formazione dei docenti di disciplina non linguistica (DNL) in lingua straniera secondo la metodologia CLIL” definendo un percorso formativo modello blended, che comprende ore in presenza e ore online. La circolare proponeva come

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requisito di accesso ai percorsi di formazione linguistica, per la quale erano previsti 50 corsi, il possesso di competenze nella lingua veicolare di livello almeno B1. Questi corsi sono stati attivati solo alla fine del 2013. I docenti già in possesso di competenze linguistiche certificate di livello C1 avevano diretto accesso alla formazione didattico-metodologica gestita dalle università, mentre i docenti in possesso di competenze linguistiche di livello B2 potevano accedere se iscritti a corsi per il raggiungimento del livello C1. Di fatto i primi 30 corsi di perfezionamento metodologico-didattico di 20 CFU organizzati dalle Università, con finanziamenti erogati da INDIRE su mandato MIUR, sono partiti anch'essi con estremo ritardo nel 2013: distribuiti su tutto il territorio nazionale, essi hanno dato la priorità ai docenti dei Licei Linguistici, già direttamente impegnati nell’insegnamento di una disciplina in lingua straniera. Alla fine del 2014 circa 900 docenti avevano completato questo percorso formativo.

I nuovi corsi di formazione in servizio del 2014 Nel 2014, grazie a consistenti finanziamenti stanziati con il DM 821 dell'11 ottobre 2013, numerosi corsi linguistici e metodologico-didattici sono stati attivati per circa 10.000 docenti dei Licei e degli Istituti Tecnici. Il Decreto Direttoriale n. 89 del 20 novembre 2013 precisa che: x il docente con competenze linguistiche di livello B2 può essere direttamente impegnato nell'insegnamento CLIL oltre ad essere ammesso alla frequenza dei corsi universitari di 20 CFU; x i corsi linguistici possono essere organizzati secondo due tipologie: a) standard, con durata di 130 ore di cui 90 in presenza e 40 online; b) di integrazione, di durata inferiore a 130 ore, da definire in base agli effettivi livelli di competenza linguistica dei docenti attraverso appositi test diagnostici. I requisiti di accesso ai corsi prevedono il possesso di competenze nella lingua veicolare almeno di livello A2; x i finanziamenti per i corsi linguistici sono stati erogati a progetti presentati agli USR da Reti di scuole; x i soggetti erogatori della formazione linguistica possono essere docenti delle scuole in rete, Università, istituzioni private, associazioni professionali, docenti madrelingua in possesso di precisi requisiti.

Chapter Two

24

Grazie aanche a nuovvi finanziamen nti garantiti ddal DM 351/2 2014 e a nuove modaalità organizzaative previste dal Decreto D Direttoriale pro ot. n. 956 del 1 dicem mbre 2014, ulteriori u corsii metodologicco-didattici sono stati organizzati con bandi a cura degli Uffici U Scolasticci Regionali presso le Università: nnella primaveera 2015 un to otale di 108 c orsi offre l'op pportunità a circa 3.0000 docenti di tuutto il territoriio nazionale ddi frequentare "Corsi di perfezionam mento CLIL" finalizzati f a co ompletare il looro percorso fo ormativo. In breve,, è finalmentee partito il pian no di formazioone per i doceenti CLIL caratterizzatto da modalitàà organizzative flessibili e ddecentrate, talii da soddisfare inn modo capillare le esigenzze delle scuolee.

La foormazione del docente CLIL C nel con ntesto europ peo Per quannto riguarda laa formazione docenti, l'Italiia si colloca tra t i paesi europei che richiedono una u "qualifica specifica" peer poter inseg gnare una materia in liingua stranieraa, come risultta dalla Figuraa 3 della pubb blicazione di Eurydice,, Key data on teaching lang guages at schoool in Europe 2012. Figura 3

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Le modalità di realizzazione della metodologia CLIL nelle scuole La scansione temporale della implementazione della metodologia CLIL viene riassunta dalla seguente Figura 4, che evidenzia il lungo processo di cambiamento richiesto da questa innovazione metodologica. Figura 4

School timeline 2014/15 2003

2010 2010/11

Legge 53

Regola menti

Nuovi Licei & Istituti Tecnici

2012/13 2013/14

1° attivazione CLIL nel terzo anno dei Licei Linguistici per LS1

2° attivazione CLIL nel quarto anno dei Licei Linguistici per LS 2

Attivazione in tutti i quinti anni dei Licei e Istituti Tecnici

Gisella Langé 2015

Il ritardo con il quale sono stati organizzati i corsi di formazione docenti ha causato forti difficoltà nell'anno scolastico 2012/13 per la attivazione dell'insegnamento di una DNL in lingua straniera nei Licei linguistici e nell'anno scolastico 2014/15 per la attivazione dell'insegnamento di una DNL in lingua straniera in tutti i licei e istituti professionali. Per questo motivo la Direzione Generale per gli Ordinamenti scolastici e per l’Autonomia scolastica ha emanato Note che forniscono indicazioni e modalità operative finalizzate ad una introduzione graduale e flessibile dell’insegnamento di una DNL in lingua straniera.

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Le norme transitorie per i Licei linguistici La Nota prot. 240 del 16 gennaio 2013, "Norme transitorie per i Licei Linguistici", offre alcune soluzioni organizzative quali: a) programmazione del docente DNL concordata anche con l’insegnante di lingua straniera o il conversatore di lingua straniera o, ove presente, con l’assistente linguistico; b) nei casi di totale assenza di docenti di DNL in possesso delle necessarie competenze linguistiche e metodologiche all’interno dell’organico dell’Istituzione scolastica, sviluppo di progetti interdisciplinari in lingua straniera nell’ambito del Piano dell’Offerta Formativa, che si avvalgano di strategie di collaborazione e cooperazione all’interno del Consiglio di classe; c) riflessione condivisa tra i docenti su best practices nazionali o internazionali e utilizzo di tecnologie multimediali e di tecniche comunicative multimodali; d) incontri tra scuole o reti di scuole, sia in presenza, sia a distanza (videoconferenze o webinar con esperti nazionali o internazionali), che permettano di condividere competenze ed esperienze.

Il monitoraggio delle esperienze CLIL nei Licei linguistici Al fine di sostenere le scuole impegnate in questa innovazione didattica, la Direzione Generale per gli Ordinamenti Scolastici e per l'Autonomia Scolastica ha istituito nel 2013 un Gruppo di lavoro finalizzato a progettare ed implementare un’azione di monitoraggio, il cui obiettivo è quello di tracciare un profilo delle esperienze CLIL attivate nei Licei Linguistici: dalle caratteristiche del docente CLIL, alle modalità di attuazione, nonché alle ricadute in termini sia di abilità acquisite dagli studenti sia di influenza sulla pratica didattica degli insegnanti. I primi risultati, raccolti in un "Rapporto di monitoraggio delle esperienze CLIL nei Licei Linguistici" (reperibile al link: http:// hubmiur.pubblica.istruzione.it/web/istruzione/dettaglio-news//dettaglioNews/viewDettaglio/29199/11210) sono stati presentati il 5 marzo 2014 presso il MIUR durante un Seminario che ha visto la partecipazione del Ministro Stefania Giannini, di Direttori Generali, dirigenti scolastici, docenti, referenti regionali CLIL, professori universitari, rappresentanti di Enti culturali stranieri, delegazioni di Associazioni disciplinari e di Organizzazioni sindacali. L'incontro ha avuto lo scopo di analizzare i dati rilevati, discutere lo stato dell’arte

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dell'l'insegnamento di una disciplina con metodologia CLIL e raccogliere suggerimenti sullo sviluppo delle successive fasi del monitoraggio. La prima fase è iniziata con un questionario online rivolto ai docenti che hanno attivato esperienze CLIL nelle classi terze nell'anno scolastico 2012/13: 480 docenti di 349 Licei Linguistici statali, su una popolazione a livello nazionale di 610 istituti, hanno risposto con puntualità, mostrando una grande disponibilità e interesse. L'elaborazione dei dati emersi ha permesso di scattare una prima istantanea dell'intero processo di attuazione di questa innovazione. Sono state evidenziate le caratteristiche di base, o, più precisamente, di partenza, del processo di introduzione di una disciplina non linguistica, per consentire ai principali stakeholders di operare in modo più consapevole. L'indagine ha permesso di tracciare un identikit del docente DNL, evidenziando che il docente DNL è “stabile” (con contratto a tempo indeterminato), con età media da 46 a 55 anni (50,4%) e in alcuni casi con diploma post-laurea. Oltre il titolo di laurea per la classe di insegnamento, molti docenti dichiarano titoli di livello superiore. Ben 54 (11,3%) sono in possesso di Master di I e/o II livello, 41 (8,3%) di Dottorato di ricerca e 80, pari al 16,7%, indicano diversi tipologie di diplomi e titoli di specializzazioni post-laurea, corsi didattici, di perfezionamento, borse di studio ecc. Interessanti appaiono i dati inerenti il livello e la tipologia di certificazione linguistica: poco più della metà dei rispondenti ne dichiara il possesso (54%), con una preponderante maggioranza di livello B2 (45%); un 4% dichiara il massimo livello di scala, C2 (vedi Figura 5). Tutte le discipline non linguistiche offerte nel Liceo Linguistico sono state coinvolte in questa prima attuazione, ma più frequentemente Storia e Scienze Naturali, come emerge dalla Figura 6.

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28 Figura 5

Figura 6

Le noorme transittorie per tuttti i Licei e IIstituti Tecn nici Con l'annno scolastico 2014/2015 diiventa obbligaatorio in tuttee le classi quinte dei L Licei e degli Istituti Tecnicci l'insegnameento di una Disciplina D non linguistiica (DNL) in lingua stranieera con metodoologia CLIL. Poiché le attività di foormazione deei docenti sia sul fronte linnguistico sia sul s fronte metodologicco risultavanoo in pieno svolgimento, la D Direzione Gen nerale per gli Ordinam menti scolasticci e per l’Auto onomia scolasstica, con Notta prot. n.

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4969 del 25 luglio 2014, ha emanato nuove "Norme transitorie" che propongono modalità operative finalizzate alla introduzione graduale e flessibile di questa innovazione e che indicano come obiettivo verso cui tendere "orientativamente" l'insegnamento del 50% del monte ore della DNL in lingua straniera. Le "Norme transitorie" stimolano l'avvio di processi innovativi in direzioni diverse, quali: a) la rilettura approfondita degli orientamenti forniti nelle Indicazioni Nazionali per i Licei e nelle Linee Guida per gli Istituti Tecnici; b) lo sviluppo di progetti interdisciplinari in lingua straniera, organizzati in sinergia tra docenti di disciplina non linguistica, il docente di lingua straniera e, ove presenti, il conversatore di lingua straniera e/o eventuali assistenti linguistici; c) l'attivazione di collaborazioni (team CLIL) all'interno della scuola o tra scuole diverse in vista della realizzazione di percorsi CLIL tra classi parallele; d) la riflessione condivisa tra i docenti su best practices nazionali e/o internazionali anche tramite utilizzo di tecnologie multimediali e di tecniche comunicative multimodali. Le Norme transitorie suggeriscono, inoltre, nei casi di totale assenza di docenti di DNL in possesso delle necessarie competenze linguistiche e metodologiche, di promuovere incontri tra scuole o reti di scuole, sia in presenza, sia a distanza (videoconferenze o webinar con esperti nazionali o internazionali), che permettano di condividere competenze ed esperienze. Infine, un'altra risorsa può essere rappresentata dai docenti impegnati nelle attività di tirocinio (50 ore) dei corsi di formazione metodologicodidattica affidati a strutture universitarie. Un aspetto rilevante della Nota riguarda gli orientamenti per la verifica dell'apprendimento di una DNL in lingua straniera in sede di Esame di Stato. Viene chiarito che qualora la DNL veicolata in lingua straniera costituisca materia oggetto di seconda prova scritta, stante il carattere nazionale di tale prova, essa non potrà essere svolta in lingua straniera. La DNL veicolata in lingua straniera costituirà oggetto d'esame nella terza prova scritta (la Commissione terrà conto della modalità con le quali l'insegnamento DNL è stato attivato secondo le risultanze del documento del Consiglio di classe) e nella prova orale, ove verranno accertate anche in lingua straniera le competenze disciplinari acquisite, ma solo se il relativo docente farà parte della Commissione di esame in qualità di membro interno.

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Nel precisare ruoli e compiti dei diversi soggetti coinvolti (Dirigenti scolastici, docenti, referenti degli Uffici scolastici regionali, Reti di scuole, ecc.), la Nota di fatto stimola l'assunzione di responsabilità in un processo di innovazione che sta favorendo un reale cambiamento del nostro sistema scolastico.

Note conclusive Le esperienze CLIL attivate in Italia, sia a livello di università sia a livello di scuole, hanno messo in luce alcuni aspetti innovativi del processo di apprendimento/insegnamento, tra cui si evidenziano la progettazione delle attività didattiche in gruppo (team CLIL), le nuove modalità e tecniche di insegnamento e la creazione di vere "comunità di pratica". Sono altresì emerse alcune criticità: la difficoltà di reperire dei materiali per l'attuazione della formazione docenti e della progettazione in funzione delle reali esigenze formative, nonché il forte bisogno di continuare a sviluppare sia le competenze linguistico-comunicative dei docenti sia le loro competenze didattico-metodologiche in ambito CLIL. In sintesi, si può affermare che l'introduzione della metodologia CLIL ha apportato modifiche rispetto alla progettazione, alle pratiche didattiche, ai materiali. Inutile negare che le esperienze CLIL stanno favorendo un ripensamento dell'intero processo didattico. È quindi necessario sostenere con attività e iniziative i docenti in un continuo processo di sviluppo professionale. Inutile negare, infine, la complessità dei problemi emersi dall'applicazione delle numerose norme, ma è indubbio che la metodologia CLIL stia aprendo nuove prospettive per le scuole e per le università in quanto si offrono occasioni reali di uso della lingua, si avviano dinamiche interattive e collaborative, si favorisce l’integrazione dei curricoli, si promuove il plurilinguismo, sviluppando così le condizioni essenziali per creare il nuovo docente “europeo”, vero protagonista del cambiamento.

CHAPTER THREE LANGUAGE CENTRES IN CERCLES IN A ‘GLOCAL’ EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THEIR MATERIALS, METHODOLOGIES AND MANPOWER GILLIAN MANSFIELD UNIVERSITY OF PARMA, ITALY

Introduction The primary aim of this paper is to discuss Language Centre activity across Europe in both a local and what I will refer to as glocal (European) perspective. I would also like to suggest how we as members of language centres can further enrich our activities, methodologies and “learning materials” as we share experiences in an enlarged community of practice (see Wenger 1998, 2006) that crosses all geographical boundaries. Thus, I would like to focus on prompting a continued and reinforced commitment in spite of the particularly difficult period that has hit language education throughout Europe. Indeed, I consider central to my mission as a representative of the CercleS Executive Board the fostering of an extensive glocal network whereby the products of our research and teaching achieve global (here in the sense of worldwide) recognition.

Work locally - Think glocally – Work glocally It goes without saying that it is part of the modus vivendi of University Language Centres across Europe to “work locally” but also “think glocally”. When reviewing a volume published by the Language Centre at the University of Zurich in celebration of their first 10 years of activity, Nick Byrne (2012) described this particular centre as “an international hub for the transfer of ideas, experiences and learning.” I think that this is an

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apt description of Language Centre activity in general and it encapsulates our overall purpose. Each national association conference and seminar, or indeed each CercleS event that we attend, brings together a wealth of experiences that we are willing to share. We do this not so much in a competitive light for the sake of self-glorification, and not only with a view to achieving formal recognition in later publication, but more specifically to presenting successful practices based on critical thinking and reflection. What emerges from these events and ensuing contributions to scholarly journals is that at the heart of all University Language Centre activity there is, and there must be, a sound preparation equally deriving from research-based teaching and teaching-based research (Willcoxson et al. 2011). These authors quote a number of scholars on the researchteaching nexus: Holbrook and Devonshire (2005) who discuss it in terms of research-informed teaching – where discipline-based research informs content – and research skills teaching – where students themselves develop their own research skills. They also add a further element of research-inquiry teaching, when academics use research to investigate the effectiveness of teaching and learning activities, i.e. research-informed teaching. Willcoxson et al. also refer to Neumann (1994) who advocates an academic perspective on the research-teaching nexus, defining it as: A multi-level relationship focusing on the global (i.e. collectively, departmental research interests provide direction, frameworks and a resource base for the courses offered students), as well as the tangible (i.e. teaching serves to disseminate research knowledge and skills) and the intangible (i.e. teaching serves to develop in students a critical approach to “knowledge” and a positive attitude to learning.

In this light, University Language Centres cannot simply be dismissed as mere Centres for Language Services. It is all too evident that they provide quality-assured language products (e.g. purpose-built on- and off-line courses, systems of accreditation and evaluation, alternative learning pathways) as well as efficient Language Centre Management systems,1 which are the result of the competence and expertise of its entire staff working towards a common goal. It is increasingly the case that Language Centre teachers are committed to investigating and to developing materials for themselves rather than availing themselves of ready-made commercial products as a shortcut to lesson and course preparation. This is also due to the fact that language courses are continually being refined to cater for 1 See the CercleS Language Policy and Management of Language Centres Focus Group activities, the Wulkow memoranda http://www.cercles.org/.

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more specific linguistic needs in an academic context, but also in preparation for students’ future professional lives. Furthermore, all language centre personnel, whether they be teaching or technicaladministrative staff, must be working for a common cause, that of fostering plurilingualism in as many ways as possible within their institution.

Our working perspectives: plurilingualism In the simplest of terms, we desire and learn to use a foreign language because we want to be able to communicate for an infinite number of purposes, in an infinite number of speech situations, with an infinite number of interlocutors. The didactic mission of a Language Centre is implicitly built around an underlying spirit of the European motto “Unity in diversity”. Due to their very nature, it only stands to reason that Language Centres must be classified as multilingual in their language policy both within and outside their strictly institutional environment. Remembering the continual bidirectional flow of our students on Erasmus exchanges, it is worth focusing on a fundamental statement in the CercleS Language Policy document: A Language Policy of an Institution in Higher Education should address issues for native and foreign languages Why? Fostering plurilingualism is a fundamental element of European Higher Education policy. How? By: - taking into account local specificities and the language needs of all parties. - actively promoting plurilingualism and institutional multilingualism. - guaranteeing access to language learning facilities based in Language Centres. - encouraging native speakers of other languages to use their own mother tongue. - enhancing linguistic and cultural diversity and awareness. - facilitating student and staff mobility. - fostering lifelong language learning.

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The exclusive use of English as a Lingua Franca threatens the quality of cultural and academic exchange.2

English is the first language taught in the majority of European Language Centres. The above warning concerning the risks involved in the exclusive use of English as a Lingua Franca is crucial if we intend to redress the balance not only in an academic environment but also in the world at large. Both this warning statement and indeed the CercleS Language Policy document in its entirety clearly state the case that other languages are equally important in maintaining the linguistic quality of academic and cultural exchange. As a native speaker of English with English on the tip of my tongue, I nevertheless need to put the dominance of my own language behind me when I travel, accepting where its use may be relevant or even helpful, but, more importantly, where freedom of expression in the native language of another country is more appropriate and welcome. My present experience within CercleS has stimulated me not to rely on my mother tongue with colleagues throughout Europe, but to appreciate, as an applied linguist, the richness of communicating in a language other than my own in order to move closer to other cultures, feel at ease with them and be more a part of them. In the light of this bi-directionality and reciprocity, language centres are clearly adhering to this kind of policy in both a local and what I have already called a glocal perspective. The following is an extract from a more “locally conceived” Language Policy document, that of the University of Helsinki. This passage encapsulates its commitment to, and rationale behind, foreign language learning, and to sustaining multilingualism and multicultural communities: Languages are a resource within the academic community The University’s bilingual and multilingual environment and internationalisation are sources of enrichment for all and are a necessity for the international comparability of its research performance. Language skills are a means to understanding foreign cultures and for making the Finnish culture known to others. The University promotes the language proficiency of its students and staff as well as supports their knowledge of different cultures. Multilingual and multicultural communities promote creative thinking. The mission of the University includes a special responsibility for Finland’s two national languages.3 2

http://www.cercles.org.

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The local perspective Let us now focus on how we organise our activities on a local “home” basis with the routine everyday running of general and specific courses that are geared to satisfying academic and professional requirements and training, as well as testing language competence. We operate locally as groups of native and non-native teachers for the immediate language needs and aims of our students. When we adopt a student-centred perspective, our work as language educators in the home institution is often heavily oriented towards a kind of constrained “inward gaze” in and amongst our students as we train them to communicate rather artificially with each other in the traditional classroom role play and pair work activities in the language they are learning. What we should really be doing more explicitly is seeking opportunities to allow learners to communicate with an “outward gaze” towards their foreign counterparts in the latters’ mother tongue. In this way, we are helping them to recognise and gain intercultural pragmatic competence in understanding and communicating with the other through the other’s language and culture, and to integrate with the other’s reality. It is an “Us and Them” distinction yet without the usual negative connotation, and which confirms the “unity in diversity” concept. From an institutional point of view, it is a healthy attitude for us to reflect on our own local policies and methodologies and at the same time gaze towards the foreign other, observe them, their policies, their activities and methodologies, their cultural make-up in relation to our own experience. The underlying question we need to ask is: What can we gain from them in order to improve our learning situations and conditions in the learning environment, possibly re-thinking the learning space? What can they gain from us? What works well for them or possibly does not, and likewise for us? Moreover, what can we do together to bridge the physical geographical gap and join forces for the mutual benefit of our students? In short, how can European language centres work with us in Italy, as they gaze in our direction and ask the same questions? Which forms of collaboration could we set up, with a view to responding to the question: “How can we all work together?” To resort reluctantly to economic terminology, but for want of a better word, we need to “market” ourselves with, rather than against, others beyond national boundaries in an attempt to achieve professional 3

http://www.helsinki.fi/strategia/pdf/kieliperiaatteet.pdf. The English text is available at pp. 39-52.

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recognition in areas of excellence, which become resourceful at a glocal level. It is a question of a reciprocal gaze, recognising and looking to partner countries, and them to us, for shared interests and professional support in a combined local and glocal educational environment.

The glocal perspective It is evident from their never failing enthusiasm to take part in European projects concerning all aspects of language education that language centres from different countries willingly join together to share and develop their professional skills in all kinds of language matters and at all levels of expertise. Let us review some common projects and partnerships: 1. CercleS has signed a memorandum of agreement with the European Centre of Modern Languages (ECML) in Graz. We are invited to take part in their events and to give our opinion on their projects. We also act as disseminators of their projects and activities, and they ours by means of social networking as well as more traditional forms of communication. 2. Examples of projects: The Explics task-based project, Exploiting Internet Case Study and Simulation Templates for Language Teaching and Learning, was coordinated by Johann Fischer, and developed in different countries. The project’s partners represented a whole range of European countries including language centres and departments from Vienna, Prague, Oulu, Navarra, Dublin, Toulouse, Padua, Wroclaw, La Guarda, Nitra, London. This goes to prove how possible and rewarding it is to engage in forms of joint ventures, drawing expertise together from all quarters. The overall product was a series of professional development modules and a handbook for language teachers and teacher trainers to disseminate these results. CercleS’ partnership role in a number of European funded projects is again that of disseminator (acting glocally): Lingu@net Worldwide and Lingu@net Europa, Language Rich Europe, LUCIDE (Languages in Urban Communities – Integration and Diversity for

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Europe) and LETPP Languages in Europe – Theory Policy Practice.4 All these projects focus on research into multilingualism. 3. CercleS Focus Groups were officially launched in 2009 at the University of Toulouse. Their aims and objectives are to: • create synergies • stimulate networking • stimulate project activities • stimulate workshops & seminars • prepare publications.5 These aims and objectives contain a number of key words and concepts that are highly relevant to the glocal perspective: synergies, networking, stimulating activities and events, as I will discuss in the second part of my paper. The CercleS Language Policy6 is the result of one Focus Group’s work and it has been distributed to all national Associations for consultation and implementation as each association sees fit. At present, the CercleS Conference and Events Management group is particularly active in preparing a document that will cover all aspects of event organisation and include a valid checklist for all those centres wishing to host an event. In 2011, a Translation Focus Group was added to the list, and suggestions for other groups to start up are welcome. Indeed, it is hoped that a spin-off from the Language Policy group might be another group on the related topic of multilingualism that could take on board a number of pressing issues within the university system and the professional world. However, group activity at a distance tends to dwindle if there is not enough input, enough stimulation to continue, if there is no way of staying in touch. This is something that needs attention in CercleS, as in any international association. There are many ways of keeping in touch if we put our minds to it, particularly through the social media. In the Focus Group meeting in Madrid 2012, Sigrid Behrent and Regina Mügge from AKS presented a document with guidelines for working in focus groups, including the need to establish short-term and long-term objectives for the 4

For further information, consult the website of each project: Lingu@net http://www.linguanet-worldwide.org/ and http://www.linguanet-europa.org/; Language Rich Europe http://www.language-rich.eu; LETPP http://www.letpp.eu/ and LUCIDE http://www.urbanlanguages.eu/. 5 For more information on Focus Group activities, consult the CercleS webpage: http://www.cercles.org/. 6 See official documents at http://www.cercles.org.

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successful running of the group. The new CercleS website has provided a separate section for Focus Group Activity, where a wikispace has been set up for consultation and collaboration within the individual groups.7

Glocal achievements Having gained an initial overall perspective, we can now take stock of our products and the ways in which we present them locally and glocally, not only and primarily for their educational use, but also for international recognition and implementation.

Awards Many language centres and their staff have achieved awards for their research projects and materials creation. First of all, the coveted European Language Label Award: The European Language Label is awarded to local, regional, and national projects that have found creative ways to improve the quality of language teaching, motivate students, make the best use of available resources to diversify the languages on offer, and other innovative initiatives.8

While the description “It is a quality label allowing you to open a window into Europe”9 particularly indicates that the prizes are awarded for projects working in what I refer to as a more “local” sense of the term, that is, within the country, it nevertheless highlights an appropriate sense of purpose and direction in language education by linking language learning figuratively beyond national frontiers and further afield in Europe. In 2012, the University of Parma Language Centre was awarded the European Language Label for a publication written by Daniela Forapani, Italiano Medico. The Language Centre of the University of Bologna CILTA likewise received the label in 2012 for WebCEF - Collaborative assessment of oral language skills through the web. Space limits me to name but a few, so it is worth browsing the site10 to see how many of AICLU’s members are winners. You will find, for example, the Università 7

See Focus Groups at http://www.cercles.org. For the database access http://ec.europa.eu/education/language/label/label_public/index.cfm?CFID=88568 5&CFTOKEN=69909162&jsessionid=138940da7f44697efdd732442750594f3a65TR 9 http://www.labeleuropeolingue.it/en_index.asp. 10 http://www.labeleuropeolingue.it/en_index.asp. 8

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per Stranieri di Siena in collaboration with other institutions for the teaching and learning of Italian, and the Language Centre of Roma Tre for CLACSON – LSP (CLA – Courses On the Net - Languages for Specific Purposes). Of particular note a recent project co-ordinated by the Language Centre of the University of Calabria, entitled Communicating in Multilingual Contexts meets the Enterprises. La conoscenza e lo sviluppo di abilità accademiche e professionali per la mobilità degli studenti, laureandi e lavoratori (2010). The University of Calabria was among the five institutions that received the European Language Label of Labels Award for the most innovative projects in language teaching and learning in the last ten years. Carmen Argondizzo, head of the Language Centre, has published a paper on the project in the CercleS journal Language Learning in Higher Education.11

Glocal materials and activities The CercleS European Language Portfolio (ELP) has received an enormous amount of scholarly attention over the past few years, not only the Italian version, but in other languages as well. All versions of the CercleS portfolio have been sent to ECML and are available on their website (as well as the CercleS website), thus increasing our visibility. We have to thank Mary Ruane and Fiona Dalziel for all their efforts in promoting the ELP and in organising dedicated CercleS seminars on the topic. The ELP is an extremely powerful tool in consciousness raising and self-presentation, making learners more aware of their levels of competence not only in the languages that they are learning on a more formal basis, but also in those they have had informal contact with. It is highly motivating for them to discover that they know more than they think they do in another language and report it in their biographies, and also to produce examples of the work they consider representative of their language competence. Products such as the ELP lend themselves to further development, as language needs are constantly refined in the light of academic study in preparation for future professions. In this perspective, it is worth identifying areas where learners can move from the generic to the more specific in presenting their language competences. David Little (2012: 1314) has proposed a challenge for CercleS for the future implementation of

11

See bibliography: Argondizzo / Jimenez (2013: 173-190).

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the ELP in both a local and glocal context, thus at the same time prompting a combining of forces within the Confederation: CercleS has committed itself to the CEFR and the ELP more strongly than any other professional association concerned with Higher Education. […] In my view it should consider developing a CEFR-based language curriculum framework for the European university sector; a slimmed-down “generic” version of the CercleS ELP that leaves plenty of room for the addition of features appropriate to particular contexts of study; and resources to support the practice of peer and self-assessment. In doing these things across national and linguistic boundaries, CercleS should contribute significantly not only to the implementation of the CEFR but also to its further development; and it could explore new ways of operationalizing the ELP, investigating the virtues and shortcomings of paper and electronic versions and exploring ways of linking generic “I can” descriptors to particular areas of academic study. CercleS should do these things because CEFR/ELP related research and development are essential if these two instruments are to thrive and evolve. […] [A] collaborative programme of research and development is the best way of adding value to CercleS membership, ensuring the coherence of future CEFR/ELP seminars, and confirming whether CercleS will respond to these challenges, whether as a European association, via its national affiliates, or in the institutions that belong to those affiliates.

Language testing modalities developed and practised in the home countries (AKS with UNIcert, Aiclucert and more recently the Acles model for accreditation) serve not simply as instances of best practice but may be implemented elsewhere. The above certifications are an excellent example of reciprocal recognition between centres of growing expertise, an area which deserves further development for official European recognition. UNIcert is a certification system for teaching foreign languages with 55 European universities accredited.12 To date, the system UNIcert® has granted over 15,000 certificates. Its advantage over other certificates is that it is primarily an open education system, targeting university students and non-linguists, which provides a general, comprehensive and transparent system of language learning. Its aim is to handle the language situation that the attendant may face while studying in universities at home or abroad and in employment too. The Spanish Association ACLES has now finalised its language accreditation model, which has been recognised by the Valencian and Andalucian local governments together with the Spanish Confederation of 12

http://www.unicert-online.org/e/index.htm.

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Vice-Chancellors, and ACLES is applying for it to be recognised by the Spanish Ministry of Education. As well as the ongoing project of Aiclucert, language centres in AICLU are committed to testing and evaluation in a university context. The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia organised two summer courses (2013) on Basic Principles in Language Testing and Assessment, and on Advanced Principles of Language Test Development.

Best practice Again, space only allows me to give some very brief examples of best practice carried out by CercleS members. The examples I have chosen to present have all been published in the CercleS journal Language Learning in Higher Education and highlight clearly outlined research-based teaching and teaching-based research methodology that is the fruit of critical reflection and discussion. They represent a range of teaching experiences from the more traditional, albeit with a less widely taught language in Ireland, to a more technologically enhanced cross-national virtual learning environment, and finally to an important aspect in the language teaching and learning forum which involves collaboration between teachers and administrative staff in search of a common goal in enhancing professionalism through a joint awareness and appreciation of the purpose of the language educational institution. Firstly, a course in one of the less widely diffused and taught languages, Korean. This course was devised at Trinity College Dublin by Lorna Carson and Eu Jee Do in an experimental 3-year period, after they had noticed an increased interest in Korean contemporary culture in Europe, and in Korean language studies in Higher Education. The course has now become a more firmly established component of the university curriculum. The paper reporting on this course13 gives a comprehensive overview of the design of learning materials selected, and discusses the development of communicative, intercultural, orthographic and orthoepic competences in language learners. Moreover, it is worth noting that the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is applied as a means of specifying and designing the programme’s specific learning tasks. Finally, formative and summative assessment procedures are also discussed, giving a sound pedagogically based course from its initial conception to its final learning objectives.

13

See bibliography: Carson / Do (2013: 151-171).

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A second course that deserves special mention in a glocal perspective is one based on collaborative course design, and the result of two crossEuropean, teaching-led research projects carried out with relatively small groups of L2 English majors at the Department of English Philology of the University of León, Spain, and at the Department of English Studies of the University of Bielsko-Biaáa, Poland.14 The projects sought to exploit the potential fostered by new technologies to enrich L2 learning conditions and undergraduates’ learning experiences using their L2 (in this case English) as a lingua franca. Guided by their teachers, a small group of Spanish and Polish students created a formal situation in a simulated job application process for the L2 class as near as possible to real life. In short, students in one country devised and posted job advertisements, prepared questions for job interviews, and in the other their counterparts prepared job application letters, discussed possible questions that they might be asked in the job interview, decided how to present themselves and to answer questions correctly. In the final part of the course, the students simulated the various stages in the job application process in a videoconference. This is an excellent example of “learning for a purpose” creating many of the conditions that a person undergoes when being interviewed for a job. It is also a fine example of collaboration between two universities that does not involve teaching staff being present in the partner country, although the project did actually originate from a staff exchange programme. The third example of best practice is from the University of Helsinki where language teachers and administrative staff join to foster a closer collaboration by means of awareness-raising courses for the latter in understanding the mission of a language centre, thus enhancing professional development and quality in Language Centre processes.15 This is clearly in line with the CercleS language policy document, which also states another two fundamental concepts regarding the common cause that human resources engage in at the workplace: A Language Policy of an Institution in Higher Education should address issues at all levels of the organisation (university, faculty, programmes, courses etc.) and be co-owned by all stakeholders and the whole university community (governing bodies, teaching, research, administrative staff and 14 For a detailed description and report of the course see bibliography: Colwell O’Callaghan (2012: 441-462). 15 See Evest / Kattainen / Vaattovaara 2013. Enhancing professionalism through collaboration between teachers and administrators in University Pedagogy courses. In Language Learning in Higher Education 3/1: 191-206.

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students) […] A Language Policy of an Institution in Higher Education should define responsibilities within the organisation.16

These statements confirm that all stakeholders must be equally committed to the language learning process, and not just the language teaching staff. They also convey the idea that it is important for non-linguists to be given the opportunity to relate to the professional environment in which they work.

CercleS publications The previous section provided some examples of papers selected for publication in the CercleS own journal of academic research, Language Learning in Higher Education. Its mission statement reflects the aims of our Confederation in the wide range of research topics it is looking to receive: Language Learning in Higher Education is concerned with all aspects of language education at tertiary level, including: learning, teaching and assessment; quality assurance; the role, status and management of language centres; the professional development of language centre staff; the exploitation of digital technologies; the development and implementation of university language policy. Submissions that report on empirical or experimental research should carry clear and explicit pedagogical implications, while those concerned with a practical dimension of language learning/teaching should include discussion of research-based principles. Submissions on other areas of interest should include critical engagement with current discussion in the relevant literature.

Pooling our resources We can pool our resources by more or less traditional means in several ways. In the previous paragraph, I referred to one of the more traditional means of sharing ideas, that of publishing our research in printed book form and/or, as in the case of Language Learning in Higher Education, in electronic format. The following sections will give an overview of how the transmission of knowledge is evolving through various means of dissemination.

16

My underlining. See official documents at http://www.cercles.org.

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Traditional means The new CercleS website, which was launched in November 2013, has been designed to give greater visibility to CercleS activities in language education; it aims to collect a wealth of information, including not only various policy documents, but also publications of Best Practice that people wish to share. This area is also a space that will allow members to express themselves in their own language, should they wish to do so, rather than in the canonical working languages of CercleS – English, French and German. Over time, we hope to extend the languages of communication to other languages throughout the site, a year at a time. This is a task that the Translation Focus Group could give advice on and help us seek assistance. The CercleS website will contain both static and dynamic pages and become interactive with access for comment from members. There will be a downloading area, a gallery for photos and links to videos, a Focus group area, a message board for staff exchanges, and so on. Furthermore, language centres are invited to submit their Language Centre Profile in the language of their choice for publication, again with a view to increasing visibility amongst members.

Towards more virtual means a) Pooling resources As technology rapidly develops, there is an ever-increasing number of ways of pooling our resources. Shared repositories are a useful way of collecting both learning and teaching materials. Language Box17 is a stimulating resource for teachers to find lesson plans in any number of languages and place their own. The essence of the initial description to the homepage indicates who the users of the site are and invites teachers to “join and share their work” with others, in the true spirit of reciprocity. Language Box is being used by participants in the Community Cafe project. This project was funded by the JISC and worked to create a collection of resources for use by community languages teachers across the UK. If you are a teacher of a community language, working in a

17

http://languagebox.ac.uk/.

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supplementary school or Saturday school, please join the site and share your work!18

We are all probably familiar with Scribd19 for retrieving reading materials, Slideshare, the hosting service where subscribers can upload presentations in various file formats (such as powerpoint, pdf, keynote and OpenDocument),20 and Flickr for uploading photos,21 to name just a few. Again, these are more recent ways of sharing. What I would like to emphasise is that, apart from Language Box, the above resources did not start out as language teaching or learning materials, but it is up to us to see how they are easily adaptable to serve our purposes in language education. My own teaching experiences have gradually led me to use a Moodle Platform in a move towards e-learning for languages. By creating this learning space, students are directed towards technologically enhanced collaborative language learning since they are given the opportunity to work and collaborate together in a virtual learning environment (VLE). One particularly useful software that serves to create a kind of repository is Delicious,22 which works as a form of Social Bookmarking, and which Noll and Meinel (2007: 367) define as “a new approach to web search personalization based on user collaboration and sharing of information about web documents.” This is an important tool for us as language educators to use too, even within the Focus Groups, since software (for example Delicious or Diigo23) allows the user to collect thematically useful sites for future reference and consultation. By simply using hashtags and key words, a wealth of information can be placed at the user’s fingertips on the keyboard. While this is, as Noll and Meinel say, a “form of personalization” in searching the web, the advantage is that colleagues can share sites with others if they have access to your code. In my own experimentation with Delicious in a teacher training class (tirocinio formative attivo – TFA), I was using for example a hashtag + Mansfield + TFA + various categories of skills for language learning materials, and participants on the course were adding their own discoveries 18

For information on JISC, consult their home page: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/: “We help organisations in the Higher Education and Further Education and Skills sectors to operate effectively, get best value for money and deliver excellent quality learning, teaching and research.” 19 http://www.scribd.com/. 20 http://www.slideshare.net/. 21 http://www.flickr.com/. 22 https://delicious.com/. 23 https://www.diigo.com/.

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(e.g. #Mansfield+TFA+listening; #Mansfield+ TFA+grammar). As Figure 1 emphasises, the keyword is share, reflecting synergy among peers.

Figure 1. Using Delicious

Highlighter24 is another software that I have experimented with my Masters students as a pre-translation awareness raising activity for possible difficulties in the translation process or, as Figure 2 illustrates, a discussion on the translation choices of an Italian text.

Figure 2. Commenting on a text with Highlighter

Students are asked to highlight words and expressions and comment on them according to the translation strategies they identify. They can comment on others’ comments, thus creating a closer form of collaboration outside the classroom. My TFA students used it too to discuss how to carry out a text analysis in a hypothetical school class, 24

http://www.highlighter.com/.

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focusing on keywords, cohesive ties, and so on. In my opinion, this software has similar potential outside the classroom environment. It is an excellent way of sharing draft documents and discussing them at a distance. Something again for the FGs to think about in their work at a distance. b) Meeting virtually We may all be short of funds, but that does not mean that we cannot meet: rather, we meet the challenge, and meet virtually! This negative situation must act as a stimulus to create alternative means of staying in touch, thanks to the ever-increasing technological means with networking that we have at our disposal. Indeed technology has offered up an opportunity for a democratisation of teaching, researching, learning and collaboration. The CercleS Executive meets on a monthly basis with Skype. I have also experienced a Flash meeting with the Teacher Training Focus group where we discussed the idea of Repositories and issues such as copyright that needed resolving. Many of us are experiencing Videoconferencing / Blackboard techniques: the University of Nebrija, for instance, has a Master’s course in Education where students and teachers have regular weekly meetings in the virtual classroom. Webinars are becoming increasingly popular; project work can benefit from the possibility of sharing screens and documents. I would like to see members of CercleS taking the initiative in the future by proposing webinars. What advantages do they have? They can be limited to a relatively small group of people with a shared research interest, they avoid travelling, they maximize time, and they are still interactional. They are an excellent example of democratisation in learning by giving everyone the chance to take part, especially young researchers and language assistants, technical and administrative staff, who are without funds for travelling to conferences. Figure 3 shows my TFA class at work. The smiling faces are indicative of a relaxed atmosphere in the virtual learning environment, and the screen contains some of the documents shared. In present times, many Language Centres have to face the reality of a diminishing work force as well as cuts in their budgets for the purchasing of essential software and hardware. As I mentioned earlier, physical distance is no longer a problem even if economic resources remain so. This is the challenge that we are capable of meeting when we participate in social networking; we can surely take inspiration from online learning that involves readily available forms of social media in order to work together in virtual communities of practice. Remembering that Facebook

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started out in an educational environment for the benefit of students on campus, its use has now extended to an infinite number of professional contexts. Our students practically expect us as language trainers to be capable of social networking ourselves. Let us then see how a context of social professional networking can be relevant and beneficial to us.

Figure 3. TFA class at work

Since Facebook, Twitter, blogging as well as podcasting are invading both the academic and professional spheres, we need to identify why and how they are used with a view to recognising their possible validity and extended use in our professional educational environment. The following paragraphs aim to stimulate critical reflection within the CercleS Confederation regarding how these forms of social networking can be attuned to our own communicative purposes in the field of language education. So in what way can social networking be beneficial to us professionally as language educators? To adapt a Firthian expression, “Are we known by the company we keep if we succumb to the attractions of Facebook and such like?” Do we need to rationalise better the deployment of social networking in general and determine which form could be used more appropriately and for which purpose? Surely we should be looking to developing ways of working together as a virtual community of practice (Wenger 2006) recognising the advantages of forms of virtual collaboration that can improve our professional performance. It is vital that language centres see themselves as a community of practice in a glocal perspective, which is made possible by social networking, as the following paragraphs propose and discuss.

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c) Communities of practice As Wenger (2006: 1) states, “Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”25 This is a true reflection of CercleS and its member institutions. Communities of practice are key to improving performance. That is surely our objective, and we can achieve it by crossing all geographical borders. Briefly, according to Wenger (2006): x Communities of practice provided a new approach, which focused on people and on the social structures that enable them to learn with and from each other. x Communities of practice enable practitioners to take collective responsibility for managing the knowledge they need, recognising that, given the proper structure, they are in the best position to do this. x Communities among practitioners create a direct link between learning and performance, because the same people participate in communities of practice and in teams and business units. x Practitioners can address the tacit dynamic aspects of knowledge creation and sharing, as well as the more explicit aspects. x Communities are not limited by formal structures: they create connections among people across organisational and geographic boundaries. Furthermore, Wenger (ibid.) emphasises the fact that a community of practice is not simply a club of friends or a network of connections between people. He defines its identity as a shared domain of interest. For this reason, becoming a member involves commitment and a shared competence, engaging in joint activities and discussions, helping each other and sharing information. Eckhert (2006) likewise stresses group identity with respect to the world around it as a basic characteristic of communities of practice and a commitment to shared understanding and mutual engagement. Communities of practice build relationships that enable individual members to learn from each other. However, a website in itself is not a community of practice although it may contain a repertoire of resources to be shared by its stakeholders and be accessible to an infinite number of 25

See also Lave and Wenger 1991 and Wenger 2000.

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Internet users. These resources are experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems – in short a shared practice that relies on time and sustained interaction. Again, while not necessarily conceived specifically with the educational environment in mind, the objectives for communication and collaboration in Wenger’s model of a community of practice are clearly adaptable to a wide range of language education contexts, as summarised in Table 1. At all levels of expertise from teaching to administrative staff, the situations outlined are applicable to our working environment, as I have added in italics beneath each of Wenger’s examples. Problem solving

Requests for information

Seeking experience

Reusing assets

Discussing developments

Can we work on this design and brainstorm some ideas; I’m stuck. Can we work on this language syllabus? I’m not sure how it fits in with the CEFR. Where can I find the code to connect to the server? Where can I find / How do I obtain the password to access Language Learning in Higher Education? Has anyone dealt with a customer in this situation? Has anyone else organised a course with mixed ability Erasmus students in one class? How did it work out? Any ideas? I have a proposal for a local area network I wrote for a client last year. I can send it to you and you can easily tweak it for this new client. I have created a series of listening activities that I’d like to add to Language Box. Can you check that the distractors in the multiple choice questions are ok? What do you really think of the new CAD system? Does it really help? How do you think MOOCs can be adapted to language learning? Can they really work?

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Documentation projects

We have faced this problem five times now. Let us write it down once and for all. There are no clear indications for Erasmus students which courses they should follow. Let’s write down the most suitable ones according to their level, and the names of the teachers and their receiving hours.

Visits

Can we come and see your after-school program? We need to establish one in our city. Can we set up a staff exchange? We need to find out how you go about setting up a Moodle platform for language learning so that we can establish one of our own? Who knows what, and what are missing? What other groups should we connect with? Who can help us with setting up a wikispace? What do we need to know? Who should we contact?

Mapping knowledge and identifying gaps

Table 1. Wenger’s (2006: online) examples of activities in a community of practice d) Virtual communities of practice Now that we have established what a community of practice is, let us take a step further towards seeing how to develop our community of practice in the glocal perspective I have been focusing on in this paper, and in the context of the social networking that we carry out thanks to our developing social media literacies. Johnson (2001: 51) discusses how “the Internet, or the WWW, becomes the ‘place’ for the community; thus networked communication has increased the parameters of what is known as community.” He outlines its inherent features and pinpoints the key concept of collaboration at a distance: “Virtual communities use networked technology, especially the Internet, to establish collaboration across geographical barriers and time zones” as well as being task-based: “virtual communities exist according to identification to an idea or task. They are organized around an activity, and they are formed as the need arises” (ibid.).

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The key concepts and features of social media are characterised by the many-to-many media where those connected are able to broadcast as well as receive text, audio and video files, software and so on; and secondly, by the participatory media, which involves the active rather than passive participation of many people (Rheingold 2008, 2010). Further to this, Rheingold (2008) highlights the essential nature of digital production tools and information distribution networks that have enabled people to mobilise new types of collective action. In doing so, he emphasises (2010: 24) the general impact of social networking by comparing the print technologies of the past with the social media technologies of today: “Just as the print technologies and literacies shaped the Enlightenment, the social media technologies and literacies will shape the cognitive, social, and cultural environments of the 21st century.” Blankenship (2011: 39) focuses primarily on the learning environment and poses the question of how social media can and should impact higher education: Interactive, community-focused online tools – like Skype, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, wikis, and the educational software Blackboard – are becoming so dominant in the classroom that it’s hard to imagine any professor or student making it through a week without them.

Gannon-Leary and Fontainha (2007:2) also emphasise the resulting improvement of knowledge through the sharing of resources: A Virtual Community of Practice […] is a network of individuals who share a domain of interest about which they communicate online. The practitioners share resources (for example experiences, problems and solutions, tools, methodologies). Such communication results in the improvement of the knowledge of each participant in the community and contributes to the development of the knowledge within the domain.

In sum, a community of practice extends beyond physical geographical boundaries; it is an improved learning environment created through increased communication and activity, where individual knowledge becomes part of the greater collaborative knowledge of the community. This is surely the way forward for future collaboration between language centres at a distance.

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e) Participation frameworks Figure 4 summarises social networking in its various forms of participation frameworks, defined as online polylogues by Marcoccia (2004) who discusses the repercussions these frameworks have on conversation structure.

Figure 4. Participation frameworks

Conversation structure proves problematical in general for newsgroups, which Marcoccia defines as people carrying on a set of multiple conversations that can be either ‘dilogal’ or ‘polylogal’. Exchanges of messages are often truncated; when they are not, the conversational sequences tend to be very short; messages are sometimes inaccurately positioned in the sequential structure of the conversation, and newsgroup readers may on occasions risk misunderstanding the conversation structure. He also identifies the different kinds of participant roles in the participation framework of newsgroups: simple readers (or eavesdroppers), casual senders and hosts. These are factors to bear in mind

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if we intend to achieve successful communication in social networking, whether we want to stimulate everyone to respond, or whether we are satisfied that there may be a lot of eavesdroppers just gaining information without responding in any way. A particular question I would like to raise is whether there are too many forms of networking, which might risk a dispersion of information rather than clearly directed dissemination of collaboratively collected knowledge. If we are using networks for the purpose for which they were originally invented, should their use be refined to a specific communicative and professional purpose? What are the inherent features of each that clearly distinguish the communicative function of one from the other? i) Facebook I would like to pose some questions here and seek answers from those who are either more informed or indeed addicted. Do people use Facebook to share things about themselves for self-promotion rather than simply for communicative purposes? Does this depend on the public or private setting that each user may give? In this perspective, is Facebook being used to inform your community of practice about what you are doing rather than specifically seeking collaboration? Possibly the difference lies in the fact that “Institutional Facebooks” are often exploited by colleagues from similar professional institutions to disseminate information to those interested in the same field. To give a practical example, calls for papers for the CercleS journal Language Learning in Higher Education are sent to other language-related institutions and associations who are willing to publish them on Facebook, or disseminate the news by other forms of social networking (Twitter). This is surely a form of solidarity working for a common cause in language education. Joinson (2008) investigates the motives and uses of Facebook, and the gratifications users derive from those uses. In his study, 137 users generated words or phrases to describe how they used Facebook, and what they enjoyed about using it. The Factor analysis identified seven unique uses and gratifications: social connection, shared identities, photographs, content, social investigation, social network surfing and status updating. Most of these are about establishing a positive face and getting to know others with common interests, all applicable in the professional world of language education too. As Figure 5 illustrates, many Facebook images are positive invitations to enter into the community, as seen by the simple requests for contact: “Join us at Facebook” (as if it were a place), “Visit us on Facebook”, and

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“Find us on Facebook.” The communicative purpose of other Facebook images is also to invite positive opinions: “Like us on Facebook”, or the thumbs up sign, thus soliciting feedback. Other messages may present negative consensus: “Wasting people’s lives since 2004.” (Figure 6)

Figure 5. Positive Facebook images

Figure 1. A negative Facebook image

It is therefore up to us to judge whether Facebook functions as a hindrance or a help in our working community. Are we really seeking simply approval of our self-glorification or are we using subtle tactics of eliciting a response, or making initial contact for future collaboration, or generally disseminating our activities to those “out there” who may be interested? ii) Twitter Twitter (and with it Retweeting, the Twitter-equivalent of email forwarding) as a network-driven genre, is another form of information dissemination. According to Boyd et al. (2010), Twitter, which was founded in 2006 to enable people to share short textual messages of no more than 140 characters (tweets) with others in the system, supports a variety of communicative practices: participants use it to converse with individuals, groups and the public at large. A particular feature of a stream of messages provided by Twitter allows individuals to be peripherally aware without directly participating in the sense of:

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a) Is there anyone “out there” interested? It is more unidirectional than emailing. Information is sent out (twitter) and sent on (retwitter), but a reply is not necessarily expected. Communication is passed on by word-of-mouth. b) Twittering at conferences (on a screen in the lecture theatre). c) Twitter as a tool for strengthening a scientific community. Concerning points b) and c) key words, concepts and catchphrases are usefully disseminated for their particular significance at a particular moment and on a particular occasion. In fact, according to Boyd et al. (2010: 8) “When a topic captures the attention of a group of people, they may want to share the topic with others as well as offer their own commentary.” This is a quick and easy method that we could use, again with our Focus Groups, or with colleagues at home when we attend a conference, or for a last minute reminder, or for checking to make sure someone is informed about an event, some innovative methodology they have come across, a project, the coining of new terminology, and so on . iii) Blogging A working definition of Weblog or blog is given by Chan and Ridgway (2006: 2) as “a technology that enables one to create a personal published web site with great ease”. Blogging is a useful tool for public reflective practice in the virtual community we have created. Writing and reading weblogs are occasions for sharing ideas and experience, seeing how others work in their educational environment, their teaching methodologies, their administrative set-up strategies. We can review our own teaching methodology in the light of what we have gained from others, what might be a useful approach with our own students, learning from others how to foresee and resolve learning difficulties, and so on. In this sense, blogging becomes a strategic tool for strengthening a scientific community. My intention in these sections has been not only to highlight briefly the inherent features and communicative functions of social media, but also to propose careful reflection on how to tailor social networking, once we have clearly established the value and function of each form for our own communicative purposes. Again, a CercleS Focus Group might like to undertake the task and inform our Community of Practice of their findings.

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Conclusions To conclude, what are the challenges we must face in language education across and beyond national and European boundaries? In the 21st century, we must tailor our technological resources to meet our needs in enhanced forms of social networking that foster collaboration for professional purposes through personalised communication across all geographical borders. First of all, as members of a European confederation of language centres in higher education, members of CercleS must contribute to and make use of a user- and sharer-friendly website that unites us in the spirit of “unity in diversity” and as true advocates of multilingualism. Then our site must gain greater visibility and transparency by including those astutely streamlined forms of social networking that will give us “added value” as the world at large seeks our expertise and consultation. We are now incorporating technologically enhanced collaborative learning into our teaching methodology not only within the four walls of the classroom but also outside it in the flipped classroom. Yet it is worth remembering that we too can be ‘on the receiving end’ by applying it in our virtual community of practice in our quest for democratisation in research-based teaching and teaching-based research as we share and exchange experiences. This contribution is the fruit of talking and listening to people and discussing their work and experiences, not only face to face but pc to pc, mobile to mobile. Having to succumb to a reduction in human resources in an era of economic constraints is hard to digest, but whatever the difficulties, this dramatic situation proves that networking strengthens ties locally and glocally. I will conclude with two poignant quotations by Nelson Mandela which epitomise our aspirations and which should be a continued source of inspiration and encouragement to us all as well as a permanent challenge to ensure empowerment through the use and understanding of a person’s mother tongue, whatever the medium and mode of communication we choose: Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savour their songs. If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.26 26

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/. Last accessed June 30 2013.

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These words are indeed an appropriate reminder that we should persevere in our mission as language educators to ensure that all languages, and just not the chosen one or the chosen few, are accepted as an irrevocable asset to the European and global citizen. As leaders in the field of language education, we must enforce the common cause of democratisation in language teaching and learning at all levels in spite of the odds against us, by taking advantage of newly developed social media and digital literacies to remove the physical barriers of geographical distance and economic restraints.

References Argondizzo C. / J. Jimenez 2013. Meeting the needs of students, in-service workers and enterprises in a multilingual and multicultural Europe: a challenge for language centres. Language Learning in Higher Education 3/1: 173-190. Blankenship M. 2011. How social media can and should impact higher education. The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education March: 39-42. Boyd D. et al. 2010. Tweet, Tweet, retweet: conversational aspects of retweeting on Twitter. HICSS-43. IEEE: Kauai, HI, January 6. At: http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf. Byrne N. 2012. Personal review. Unsere Mehrsprachigkeit – a collection of impressions published for the 10th anniversary of the Language Centre of the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. At: http://www.sprachenzentrum.uzh.ch/ueberuns/Rezension_ByrneNick_ 2012.pdf. Carson L. / E.J. Do 2013. Establishing a Korean language programme in a European Higher Education context: rationale, curriculum and assessment procedures, Language Learning in Higher Education3/1: 151–171. Chan K. / J. Ridgway 2006. Blog: a tool for reflective practice in teacher education? At: https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/smart.centre/Publications/BlogsFlorid aeista2005.pdf. Colwell O’Callaghan V. 2012. Engaging L2 undergraduates in relevant project work and interaction: a role for video conferencing. Language Learning in Higher Education 2/2: 441-461. Gannon-Leary P. / E. Fontainha 2007. Communities of practice and virtual learning communities: benefits, barriers and success factors. eLearning Papers 5, September: 1-13.

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Johnson C. M. 2001. A survey of current research on online communities of practice. The Internet and Higher Education 4/1: 45-60. Joinson A. 2008. ‘Looking at’, ‘Looking up’ or ‘Keeping up with’ people? Motives and uses of Facebook. CHI proceedings, Online Social Networks, April 5-10, Florence, Italy. Lave J. / E. Wenger 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Little D. 2012. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and the European Language Portfolio: some history, a view of language learner autonomy, and some implications for language learning in higher education. Language Learning in Higher Education 2/1: 1–16. Marcoccia M. 2004. On-line polylogues: conversation structure and participation framework in internet newsgroups. Journal of Pragmatics 36: 115-145. Noll M. / C. Meinel 2007. Web search personalization via social bookmarking and tagging. The Semantic Web. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4825: 367-380. Rheingold H. 2008. Using social media to teach social media. The New England Journal of Higher Education Summer: 25-26. —. 2010. Attention and other 21st-Century social media literacies. Educause Review September/October: 14-24. At: https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM1050.pdf. Wenger E. 1998. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, —. 2000. Communities of Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wenger E. 2006. Communities of practice: a brief introduction. At: http://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/06-Briefintroduction-to-communities-of-practice.pdf. Willcoxson L. / M.L. Manning / N. Johnston / K. Gething 2011. Enhancing the research-teaching nexus: building teaching-based research from research-based teaching. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23/1 1-10.

PART TWO: INNOVATIVE CHALLENGES FOR LANGUAGE CENTRES

CHAPTER FOUR TEACHING AND TESTING STUDENTS WITH SPLDS: EXPERIENCE FROM THE VENICE UNIVERSITY LANGUAGE CENTRE CLAUDIA D’ESTE AND GERALDINE LUDBROOK CA’ FOSCARI UNIVERSITY OF VENICE, ITALY

Introduction In Italy, students with disabilities have been integrated into mainstream education for decades. In recent years, detailed national guidelines have been set out regarding learning and assessment for students who are medically certified with specific learning disabilities (SpLDs) to guarantee their access to all levels of education. The guidelines are mostly intended for students in secondary school, although they are also applicable to university education, and represent an important step forward in providing support for students with these difficulties. However, there is no recognition of the difference in learning and assessment procedures in the two educational contexts. The guidelines thus remain a generic indication for teachers and testers in universities who are often forced to seek solutions on an ad hoc basis. This article reports on the procedures followed to draw up an in-house protocol applied to the learning and assessment of the English language proficiency of students enrolled at the Venice University Language Centre (ULC) who are certified with dyslexia and related SpLDs. We begin with a brief definition of these SpLDs and the implications they have for the learning of English as a second or foreign language for Italian students. We review the legislative background in Italy to identify the provisions set out for students with SpLDs. We then describe the context of the

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University of Venice Language Centre and the policies applied to students with SpLDs. In the second part of the paper we focus on the case studies of two students with SpLDs enrolled in English language courses at the Venice ULC. In particular, we report on the manner in which access to the courses was managed, and the difficulties encountered by teachers and students alike in the classroom. We also give details on how testing was arranged: the accommodations and modifications applied. We conclude with a reflection on the outcomes attained by the students, and the need to consider individual cases of students with SpLDs ad personam, but not ad hoc, so as to guarantee both fair access to foreign language learning and valid testing of their abilities.

Dyslexia, related SpLDs, and foreign language processing It is beyond the scope of this article to put forward a detailed definition of dyslexia and related learning difficulties. However, a review of the main features of dyslexia identified in the literature may help in terms of a better understanding of the difficulties dyslexics face in processing language. Firstly, dyslexia is a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent wording, reading and spelling. Slow or inaccurate word-recognition stems from difficulties in matching phonemes to graphemes; spelling is also problematic (Kormos / Smith 2012: 30-31). Secondly, dyslexia often brings with it difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed. People with dyslexia often process orally presented information more slowly and less accurately, and have difficulties in retaining spoken information within their short-term memory systems (ibid.). Thirdly, dyslexia is neurobiological in origin and is not related to measured IQ, occurring across a wide range of intellectual abilities. Dyslexia is often diagnosed when a person has more difficulty with reading, writing, and spelling skills than their thinking and reasoning abilities would predict. This is known as the psychometric discrepancy model of dyslexia, i.e. the idea that dyslexia is identified by a discrepancy between reading attainment and a measure of ability or potential (see British Psychological Society 1999). In typical readers, cognition and reading/spelling develop together while in dyslexic readers they appear to develop differently (Gabrieli 2009). Fourthly, dyslexia is not a distinct category with clear cut-off points, but is often a series of related difficulties in multiple cognitive and

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academic areas. It is therefore usually conceived as on a continuum ranging from moderate to severe difficulties (Payne / Turner 1999). Some of the difficulties that are commonly related to dyslexia are: - dysgraphia (difficulties with writing) - dysorthographia (difficulties with spelling and grammar) - dysnomia (difficulties recalling words or names). In addition to these linguistic difficulties, there are also some common cognitive problems connected with dyslexia that are often exhibited. These may include: x x x x

dyscalculia (difficulties in acquiring arithmetical skills) dyspraxia (difficulties in motor coordination) short-term memory deficit (shorter working memory span) attention deficit disorder (ADD), often associated with hyperactivity (ADHD).

Dyslexics may have problems when reading and listening to longer oral or written texts as they have trouble in retaining information in their working memory. At the same time, a limited attention span adds fatigue to learning, which requires repeated input of new information. Difficulties with attention deficit can also lead to problems in managing time and personal organisation, which can impact severely on classroom learning (Kormos / Smith 2012: 32-33). SpLDs often occur simultaneously, and they also occur in varying degrees of severity. Such multiple diagnoses are known by the term “comorbidity”, which can reflect an inability to supply a single diagnosis that accounts for all symptoms. It is therefore very important to have as detailed as possible individual linguistic and cognitive diagnosis, as each person has a different degree of overlapping symptoms (see Ferrer / Shaywitz / Holahan / Marchione / Shaywitz 2010, and Lyon / Shaywitz / Shaywitz 2003 for further information on defining dyslexia and related SpLDs). Research indicates that a person’s native language learning facility affects their potential for learning a foreign language. There appears to be similar development in spelling and reading profiles in the first language and in the second language, even though different levels of proficiency are reached in both languages. Hence students with dyslexia – who have difficulties with phonology and orthography, and syntax – frequently struggle when learning foreign languages. In addition, foreign language

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learning may bring with it the attendant problems of lack of motivation and high anxiety (see Sparks / Ganschow 1991; Sparks / Ganschow / Patton 2008). Moreover, the occurrence of dyslexia would seem to differ across languages. Dyslexia is common in languages with writing systems with irregular correspondence between sounds and letters (deep orthographies). It is less common in languages with writing systems in which sounds and letters map more consistently (transparent orthographies) (Lindgren 2012: 19). English has a highly inconsistent match between the 26 graphemes and the 44 phonemes of its sound and writing systems. Indeed, according to the British Dyslexia Association, it is estimated that 10% of the British population are dyslexic. Italian, on the other hand, has a close match between letters and sounds, and Italy has much lower numbers of dyslexics, approximately 4 to 5% of the population (Associazione Trelle et al. 2011; Lindgren 2012; Lindgren / De Renzi / Richman 1985). Thus, if we take into consideration the contrast in orthographies between the two languages, the learning of English for Italian dyslexic students is additionally problematic. This brief outline of potential language problems for dyslexics highlights how the process of second language acquisition brings with it an additional load for learners with dyslexia and related SpLDs. The structural differences between Italian and English also bring further difficulties into play. We now turn to the Italian context and the legislative provisions made for students with SpLDs within the Italian education system.

The Italian context Specific legislation on SpLDs has been produced in Italy only in the last decade. Even though students with SpLDs represent around 4 to 5% of the Italian school population, in the early 2000s legislation was limited to local regulations, regional laws and ministerial guidelines. Before 2010, there was no national law providing a general overview of SpLDs and indications to cover all educational levels. Recognition of students with SpLDs, the adoption of learning and teaching strategies to meet their needs, and the use of compensatory instruments and technologies were applied according to local legislation with considerable differences between regional educational contexts. Best practices were thus not shared in a national perspective, but limited to a small number of teachers and education professionals. Specific learning difficulties were fully recognised by law no.

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170/2010. The key points of this law are early diagnosis and certification, teaching and learning flexibility, and the introduction of compensatory measures or exemptions. The law defines dyslexia, dysgraphia, dysorthographia, and dyscalculia as specific learning difficulties and sanctions the right to education for students with these learning difficulties. It sets down the need for an official medical diagnosis and certification of cases of SpLDs. Once official diagnosis has been obtained, students may obtain an individual educational plan (PEI, or Piano Educativo Individualizzato). Individual educational plans are a combination of what is called individual learning (didattica individualizzata) and personalised learning (didattica personalizzata). Individual learning refers to the student’s individual activities and method of study to develop and improve weaker skills and competences. Personalised learning concerns the use of different teaching methodologies and strategies in order to meet the student’s needs and promote their potential. However, individual educational plans refer only to the school context, and the law makes no similar provisions for university education. Conversely, the compensatory measures or exemptions established by law can be applied at all levels of education. Legislation indicates that they may be used not only in the classroom but also during examinations. University courses are for the first time included in the analysis and investigation of students with SpLDs, and the indications provided by the law must also be applied to entrance tests and curricular examinations at university level. Decree no. 5669/11 implements law no. 170/10 by focusing on new educational and assessment methodologies and on the training of support teachers. Specific guidelines are included in the decree to provide recommendations, suggestions and instructions springing from most recent studies on SpLDs. The guidelines basically stipulate two kinds of provisions: compensatory measures and exemptions. The decree and guidelines provide for the use of educational and technological compensatory instruments to facilitate study, such as: -

tables or mind maps voice synthesisers to convert language text into speech recorders instead of note-taking PC word processors with spelling and grammar checks calculators.

Exemptions refer to

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exoneration from activities that students with SpLDs find particularly hard to perform such as written tasks, which can be replaced by oral activities up to 30% extra time allotment during tests reduction of the curricular programme to be studied.

Only in the case of serious SpLD diagnosis can students be exempted from written examinations and given an oral interview instead. Further legislation has provided additional guidelines with specific reference to the teaching and testing of foreign languages (DM 12/07/2011: the so-called Legge Gelmini). Recommendations are provided as to the criteria to use for assessment. In relation to receptive skills (reading and listening) the legislation suggests that teachers and testers should focus on general understanding rather than on accuracy and detailed comprehension. As far as productive skills are concerned, teachers are invited to apply the same principles and evaluate communicative effectiveness. Task achievement is of the utmost importance; however, it is suggested that, when assessing students with dyslexia and SpLDs, grammar range and accuracy together with the use of a wide range of lexical resources are not to be considered as essential features. The legislation also provides for the use of technological compensatory instruments in testing settings. These include voice synthesisers to assist reading skills, and PC word processors with spelling and grammar checks and online dictionaries to assist writing skills. What instruments are used in examinations is at the discretion of the examining commission. Exemptions are represented by a reduction in the curricular programme and, in the case of certified severe SpLDs, students might be exonerated from written assessment and be provided with equivalent oral assessment. Exemption from all forms of written assessment of a foreign language was initially permitted, but this measure was modified in later legislation. It is now recommended that dyslexic students be given additional time for written exams in foreign language state exams rather than exemption to ensure the legal validity of the final diploma. Recent Italian legislation therefore pays specific attention to the learning and assessment of the foreign language skills of students with dyslexia and SpLDs in the education system, providing guidelines for assessment criteria and compensatory and exemptive measures. The critical aspect of the legislation is the discretional choice of compensatory measures and exemptions. In the secondary school context, teachers may observe the performance of students over a period of time following the

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guidelines of their individual learning plans, and make informed decisions about their application. However, at university level, students work in relative isolation, and co-ordination between individual teachers and the disabilities offices is at best tenuous. This makes decisions regarding what measures to apply problematic. We return to this issue below.

The context of the Venice ULC The Venice University Language Centre provides courses in English, French, German, Italian for foreigners, Spanish, and Russian. The courses are open to university students as well as external students, and are organised following the university terms; however, intensive or semiintensive options are also available. The general teaching method adopted is the communicative approach applied through the functional method in multimedia classrooms. The courses therefore do not substitute official university teaching, but develop communicative skills. Access to the courses is provided through a computerised adaptive placement test. Exit tests to all courses are also computer-delivered and include written and oral components. The importance of the courses offered at the ULC has increased considerably in recent years as the end-of-course certification has been increasingly recognised within students’ academic careers. Certificates issued by the ULC are used to provide evidence of the CEFR B1 level of English proficiency required for students enrolling at Italian universities and of the CEFR B2 level of English proficiency required for students completing their undergraduate degrees. ULC certificates are also used for access to ERASMUS student exchange programmes. Much higher stakes are therefore now involved in the need to provide fair and valid tests for language courses. For students who do not hold certification of language proficiency from international certification boards, Venice ULC has also developed inhouse computer-based tests to permit students to meet these new mandatory language requirements. In this context, test administrators at the Venice ULC have over the past five years worked towards a policy of inclusion, while applying the measures available under Italian law. They attempt to avoid exemptions or alternative forms of testing for students with disabilities, even though the law allows students to request these measures. Deaf students are exonerated from the listening test, otherwise a variety of compensatory measures are applied to guarantee students with disabilities fair access to the test. Visually-impaired students, for example, are allowed screen magnification or enlarged font and bigger line spacing,

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or read-aloud accommodations. The measures to be applied to students with dyslexia and related SpLDs are given careful consideration, and are normally decided on a case-by-case basis. As a general rule, these students are given 25% extra time to complete the test; in addition, students who request it are permitted the use of a voice synthesiser. The aim of providing fair access to language tests in the context of the delivery of the B1/B2 English tests to students with dyslexia and SpLDs has involved consultation with language teachers, test administrators and representatives of the university disabilities office (see D’Este / Ludbrook 2013). The experience acquired has provided an invaluable basis for the issue that will be discussed in the section below: developing a protocol setting out best practices in providing fair access to language learning and valid assessment for students with SpLDs enrolling at general foreign language courses at the Venice ULC.

Access protocol and learning agreement To meet the needs of the growing numbers of students with SpLDs enrolling in higher education, most universities have established some provisions for supporting the learning needs of students with SpLDs. The services include assistance from personal tutors and the provision of adaptive technologies to facilitate learning and assessment. Most universities now have specific offices with trained staff to assist students with disabilities in their university studies and provide co-ordination with teachers regarding access to examinations. However, as has already been stated, there is often a lack of clarity about the nature of this support, including who should provide it, what should be covered, how it can be funded, and where and in what form it should be delivered. The Venice ULC, as part of the University of Venice, is committed to offering an inclusive language study programme to ensure the best possible progress for all students, whatever their needs and abilities. In the absence of specific institutional definitions of inclusion policies and procedures regarding the ULC non-curricular language courses, the ULC aims have been to provide a continuum of special education services in the University context by drafting an access protocol according to national laws and regulations. The access protocol is the outcome of the ULC student-centred approach and of the interplay between administrative and teaching staff in order to identify the students’ needs and provide a detailed and, whenever possible, personalised set of special accommodations. The protocol is made up of five key phases:

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1. an initial evaluation meeting 2. definition of possible special accommodations and compensatory instruments 3. definition and/or creation of personalised learning material 4. definition of possible exemptions 5. drawing up the learning agreement. The initial evaluation meeting consists in collecting priority data about the student that will be taken into account when making decisions about the student’s foreign language study programme. Firstly, it is necessary to obtain the student’s medical diagnosis in order to gather all possible information regarding the nature and the severity of his or her learning difficulties. If the student is already enrolled in a university course, such documentation is provided by the university’s disability office. Together with the medical diagnosis, the student’s learning profile is also supplied. The learning profile is crucial as it is the main evidence of students’ progress in their university (or school) study programme, of their current level of educational proficiency, and of personally-tailored strategies and actions that have already been applied to support their study. The learning profile is an essential starting point to focus on what has worked (or not) for the student in the past, because all new support actions must take into account strategies and accommodations which past experiences have shown to be effective or ineffective to avoid wasting time and resources. Another important aspect of the initial evaluation phase is the analysis of the kind of language course the student wants to attend, how it is delivered, and related assessment methods. The standard ULC language courses are 50-hour classroom courses integrated by 10 hours of self-study in the ULC multimedia language laboratory or on the ULC interactive language learning website. All standard courses end with a final computerised test, a written task and an oral interview. The ULC also offers 30-hour courses (modules) focusing on specific language skills without a final assessment. The student’s choice of attending a standard course or a specific language module is a decisive factor, as it can introduce different problems and considerations. Standard courses require greater time and study commitment than modules. In addition, students attending modules are not required to sit a final test. All information gathered in the initial phase is essential to determine a list of possible special accommodations and compensatory instruments. According to their profiles and diagnoses, students with SpLDs are allowed to use educational and technological instruments or to be given

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extra time while doing specific language tasks, or possibly might be exempted from them. A meeting is then organised between the student and the course teacher in order to discuss the possibility of drawing up an Individual Educational Plan if the student explicitly requests accommodations, adjustments and exemptions as defined by national legislation. During the meeting, preliminary support actions are defined to concentrate on the student’s individual learning style, and on his or her expressed evolving needs and learning priorities. After listening to the student and gaining awareness of his or her learning needs, the teacher is then able to introduce tailored strategies, and make every possible effort to include them in the classroom context in the most appropriate manner. Further meetings may also be held during the course to verify the learning process and arrange the production of personalised learning materials. Examples of such materials are written or reading exercises with modified tasks, conceptual maps to be used for self-study, and computer-based exercises. Taking into account the student’s SpLDs and previous measures the student has been used to working with, during the meeting the teacher is also in a position to decide whether the student can be allowed compensatory measures or to be exempted from particular types of tasks, both in classroom activities and in the final assessment. The natural outcome of the previous phases is the drawing up of a learning agreement. The main aim of the agreement is to define the roles of the student and the teacher since they are both involved as active players in the learning process. Building a shared responsibility is of the utmost importance to fostering the students’ motivation and empowering them by giving them control of their language learning. From this perspective, the agreement becomes a bilaterally recognised tool to define the best learning conditions that can be offered to the students to achieve their goals. It starts from the re-definition of the students’ learning objectives in the light of their learner profile and the identification of all the forms of support that the ULC is able to provide. It also outlines the student’s special assessment accommodations as indicated in national guidelines. Finally, the learning agreement promotes the co-operative approach as a potential means to raise the learners’ expectations, seek their views and develop their independence by trying to set challenging and appropriate targets in response to their profile.

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Two case studies In this section we will report on the cases of two students with certified SpLDs who enrolled in standard language courses to illustrate the procedures implemented at the Venice ULC. As specified above, the standard language courses comprise 50 hours of classroom time and a further 10 hours of self-study in the multimedia language laboratory, with a final computer-delivered exit test. The first participant, Tommaso, was a 21-year-old university student studying architecture. His medical certification diagnosed moderate to severe dyslexia, and mild dysgraphia and dysorthographia. The documentation recommended the use of technological devices such as a voice synthesiser, a word processor with a spell-check function, an electronic dictionary, and the possibility of recording lectures. As far as assessment was concerned, the documentation suggested the student be given extra time in written tasks and that assessments should be divided into shorter sessions to be delivered separately. With specific reference to English language assessment, the documentation recommended that oral assessment should be the main form to be used, together with the nonevaluation of possible spelling mistakes. In spite of the recommendations of his medical certification, Tommaso chose to take the standard online placement test to enrol in ULC language courses. He wrote to introduce himself to the Centre and to disclose his learning difficulties only after he had been placed in an English course and he had enrolled at the Centre. His entry test result placed him at a CEFR A1.2 level. Despite late disclosure of his special needs, Tommaso agreed to meet the course teacher to discuss his case. He clearly stated that his objective was to achieve a B1 level of English language proficiency, which he needed to meet the language requirements of his university. Tommaso, however, fully recognised his lower level of language competence. In the initial evaluation meeting, he revealed that he had never used voice synthesis before enrolling at the ULC, but that he was interested in taking advantage of the opportunity to use it in this context. He appeared to be a willing and active participant in his language learning programme. The second participant, Giovanni, aged 19, had just completed secondary high school. His diagnosis was of moderate dyslexia with related dysgraphia and dyscalculia. He contacted the ULC before placement and enrolment, requesting special assessment accommodations. His medical certification made the same recommendation as that of Tommaso: the use of technological educational devices, extra time and

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division of assessment tests. Giovanni disclosed his special needs early in the enrolment process and did not do the online placement test, choosing instead to take an equivalent oral placement test. After the test he enrolled in an English course at the CEFR B1.1 level. Giovanni appeared to be less motivated than Tommaso. He was not enrolled in a university undergraduate course, and so had no immediate need for certification of his language proficiency, although it would be useful for future employment. He met the course teacher to discuss his case, but he did not demonstrate particular interest in collaborating to identify his real needs. Like Tommaso, Giovanni had no previous experience with voice synthesis. However, he showed little interest in familiarising himself with this technology, which is available for students through the ULC language laboratory.

Teaching After the initial meetings, both students and their teachers drew up learning agreements in order to counterbalance possible difficulties in the learning process. It was agreed that both students would: -

record their lessons instead of taking notes complete written exercises done in class at home and then hand them in to teachers by e-mail not be obliged to speak in public during the classroom lessons meet regularly with the teacher to verify improvements and difficulties that might emerge during the course be allowed to take breaks and leave the classroom during lessons to rest.

Shortly after the start of both courses, the presence of the students in the classes (whose special needs had not been disclosed by the teachers) raised issues regarding the classroom dynamics. The teachers independently reported that both students had problems in replying to direct questions not only from the teacher but also from classmates. They were reluctant to do pair work and to complete written exercises even at home. In addition, they were often inattentive and easily distracted, which the teachers felt sure was due to fatigue. These behavioural patterns were considered to be disruptive to the classes and were creating discontent amongst the other students. The ULC procedure combines equipping experienced teachers with further training in the special educational needs of students with SpLDs,

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and modified classroom instruction providing students with a slower introduction of new material, highly structured classes, and substantial repetition and review. This approach has been shown to lead to success in the acquisition of foreign languages by university students with SpLDs at a level comparable to their peers in regular foreign language classes (see Downey / Snyder / Hall 2000). Both teachers in this study had extensive experience in teaching English as a foreign language, and had received initial preparation regarding the learning difficulties involved in students with dyslexia. After they reported their difficulties in the classroom, they were given additional awareness training of the problems of short-term memory deficit and attention deficit disorder, which are often related to dyslexia and can also lead to problems in time management and personal organisation. With this greater understanding of SpLDs, the teachers reviewed the teaching procedures adopted not only with the two students, but with the class as a whole. They introduced strategies to provide better scaffolding: they set more specific targets in written tasks for all the learners to work towards, and they also developed differentiated teaching material to present information in varied formats. Conceptual maps and multisensory material were introduced for all students during the lessons, promoting a more inclusive classroom setting. In addition to these generalised modifications, the teachers also developed special written tasks for the two students, and the teachers made sure they were given additional time when asked to do individual reading tasks. Both students were encouraged to access the online ULC language resources and to use the language laboratory to familiarise themselves with the general content and vocabulary of their lessons through exercises available there in an accessible layout with large clear fonts, and a small number of exercises per page, often accompanied by visual supports. Although the two students had similar medical diagnoses of their SpLDs, and similar accommodations were agreed on, the teachers reported that the two students behaved very differently during the course. Tommaso attended regularly and participated actively in the lessons, completing the written tasks assigned. The teacher described Tommaso as a motivated student, but also stated he was not very talkative during the lessons, which she felt might be caused by his dyslexia-related problems or shyness, or a combination of both factors. As a consequence, it was very hard for him to socialise with other students in the class. He did not book any further appointments to speak to the teacher during the course, but he did start using online materials in the language laboratory and learned to use the

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voice synthesiser software available at the ULC. He also installed and began using the same software on his personal computer. Giovanni, on the other hand, seemed less motivated and more absentminded right from the start of the course. The teacher reported he was very often late for lessons or used to leave before the end of the lesson. Like Tommaso, he was not talkative, did not socialise with his classmates, and did not book any further appointments with the teacher. However, Giovanni was not very active with written class work, even when given adapted written tasks, and as far as homework was concerned, he rarely completed the tasks assigned.

Testing The end-of-course tests were discussed with the two students in the initial evaluation meeting with the teachers in order to provide the adjustments/accommodations as indicated by national guidelines. The importance of clarity in the objectives of coursework assignments was recognised as the first step to define the final assessment format, administration and, only if unavoidable, modification in content. The final UCL standard course exam consists of three tests: a computer-based test assessing grammar and vocabulary, and reading and listening skills; a written task; and an oral interview to verify speaking and communicative skills. The computer test is administered in a computer laboratory through an e-learning platform (Moodle). It consists of multiple choice, true/false questions or gap-fill tasks. The computer delivery of the test means that the layout can easily be modified, fonts can be changed, enlarged and spaced. Voice synthesis can also be used, with the possibility of choosing different voices and reading speeds. The test is delivered online, so students can be given access to electronic dictionaries and spell-check functions while they are taking the test. The time allotted to the test is set automatically, but can be programmed to provide extra time. Written tasks differ according to the language level. However, at the lower levels of the CEFR, they are usually short texts with open-answer questions. The oral interview tests the student’s ability to take part in a conversation using questions or pictures as prompts. It is taken paired with another student to allow interactive skills to be assessed. According to the teachers’ reports, the two students made different choices when deciding on accommodations during the drawing up of the learning agreement. Following the national guidelines, the students were offered the accommodations available under Italian law. In addition, they

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were offered the possibility to sit an equivalent oral test instead of the standard computer test. Tommaso sat the standard computer test with extra time and use of the voice synthesiser and electronic dictionary. He chose to sit the standard writing and speaking tasks, including the paired speaking test. His results showed that although he was weak on the computer test (59%), he did well during the oral interview and in the writing task. He passed the overall final test and was awarded an A1.2 level certificate. Giovanni also sat the standard computerised test with extra time. He did not request voice synthesis because of his unfamiliarity with it. He asked to use a monolingual dictionary during the test; he chose to complete a special writing task at home; and he also chose to take the standard oral interview with a partner. His test results showed that he performed well on the speaking part of the test, but he did not reach a pass level on the section delivered via computer (grammar and vocabulary, and reading and listening skills). The course teacher examined his test results and interpreted the results avoiding giving importance to spelling errors and some vocabulary mistakes. Nevertheless, the overall test result was far below an acceptable level to pass the course and be awarded the final certificate.

Reflections The two case studies reported here very clearly highlight the difficulties involved for administrative and teaching staff when attempting to apply the accommodations for students with SpLDs set out under Italian law. The Venice ULC has developed a protocol involving a series of measures to be applied in the case of such students enrolling in nonundergraduate language courses so as to provide these students with fair and effective access to language learning and testing: pre-course meetings with the teachers to identify the students’ individual needs and to agree on appropriate ways of organising both classroom lessons and individual study; the use of technological support, where requested; and the application of suitable accommodations for final assessment. In addition, language teachers are given training in awareness of how comorbid symptoms can be present in students with SpLDs, and are also provided with support and assistance for individual cases. Nevertheless, the two students in this study showed very different behaviour patterns, despite their similar SpLD profiles and the comparable procedures followed to include them in the classroom and testing contexts, which were determined on the basis of consultation with the students and

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on careful observation of their needs as they emerged during the course. They also showed different outcomes in their test results. Consultation with the teachers and the administrators assisting them reveals that it is extremely difficult to identify the causes of these differences. On the one hand, one of these candidates had clear short-term goals for his language learning (obtaining the language certification required by his university) whereas the second student seemed from the start to be less focused as to what his expectations were of the language course. Personal motivation may therefore have played an essential role in determining what language level the students reached through the course, and the manner in which it was achieved. On the other hand, it is widely reported in the literature how difficulties related to dyslexia, such as attention deficit, can make classroom learning extremely difficult for students with SpLDs. Lack of concentration and non-involvement in the classroom context may therefore be attributable to these medical issues rather than to personal attitudes. The Venice ULC addresses the issues of fair access to foreign language learning and valid testing of students with SpLDs in various ways: training and awareness-raising of language teachers, the development of an access protocol that actively involves students in decisions regarding the measures adopted to assist their language learning, and the careful application of test modifications and technological assistance to best serve these students’ individual needs. The process of acquiring information and experience that can contribute to improving the support given to students with SpLDs is an ongoing one. Further investigation will continue to guarantee a principled application of Italian law that also takes into consideration the needs of individual students.

References Associazione Trelle, Caritas Italiana and Fondazione Agnelli. 2011. Gli alunni con disabilità nella scuola italiana: bilancio e proposte. Trento: Edizioni Erickson. British Psychological Society Dyslexia. 1999. Literacy and Psychological Assessment (Report of a working party of the Division of Educational and Child Psychology). Leicester: British Psychological Society. D’Este C. / G. Ludbrook 2013. Fairness and validity in testing students with SpLDs: a case study from Italy. In D. Tsagari / G. Spanoudis (eds), Assessing L2 Students with Learning and Other Disabilities. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press: 169-188. Downey D. M. / L. E. Snyder / B. Hill 2000. College students with

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dyslexia: persistent linguistic deficits and foreign language learning. Dyslexia 6/2: 101-111. Ferrer E. / B.A. Shaywitz / J.M. Holahan / K. Marchione / S.E. Shaywitz 2010. Uncoupling of reading and IQ over time: empirical evidence for a definition of dyslexia. Psychological Science 21: 93-101. Gabrieli J.D.E. 2009. Dyslexia: a new synergy between education and cognitive neuroscience. Science 325: 280-283. Kormos J. / A.M. Smith 2012. Teaching Languages to Students with Specific Learning Differences. Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Lindgren S. D. / E. De Renzi / L.C. Richman 1985. Cross-national comparisons of developmental dyslexia in Italy and the United States. Child Development 56/6: 1404-1417. Lindgren S-A. 2012. Mild developmental dyslexia in university students: diagnosis and performance features in L1, L2, and L3. English Department Publications 6. Turku: Åbo Akademi University. At http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/73898/lindgren_signe.pdf? sequence=2. Lyon G.R. / S. E. Shaywitz / B.A. Shaywitz 2003. Defining dyslexia, comorbidity, teachers’ knowledge of language and reading: a definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia 53/1: 1-14. Payne T. / E. Turner 1999. Dyslexia: A Parents’ and Teachers' Guide. Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto: Multilingual Matters. Sparks R.L. / L. Ganschow 1991. Foreign language learning difficulties: affective or native language aptitude differences? Modern Language Journal 75: 3-16. Sparks R.L. / L. Ganschow / J. Patton 2008. L1 and L2 literacy, aptitude and affective variables as discriminators among high- and lowachieving L2 learners with special needs. In J. Kormos / E. H. Kontra (eds), Language Learners with Special Needs: An International Perspective. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters: 1-10.

CHAPTER FIVE MASTER IN INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION: WHEN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT FACES A TIGHT BUDGET MARGHERITA PELLERITI UNIVERSITY OF MODENA AND REGGIO EMILIA, ITALY

Introduction During the academic years 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia started a first level degree Masters course in international cooperation with three different specialisation tracks: “Planning and management of interventions”, “Disabilities”, and “Emergencies”. Among the classes in common there was one called “Foreign language certification and/or English tuition”. Since it was not possible to offer traditional lessons – with an instructor and an exit exam – for limited budgetary reasons, the language assessment was entrusted to the University Language Centre which provided the Masters course students with an exam syllabus, an opportunity of guided self-access study, web resources and a final exam. Starting from the profile of the Masters course participants, this paper will illustrate the computerised English exam which used the new testing platform of the Language Centre. Not only were the competences in lexis and grammar assessed, but also the two receptive skills: written and oral comprehension at B1 level. This is the threshold level established by the CEFR and is the one which allows the future aid worker to “survive” when working abroad. The exam structure will be presented in terms of techniques and numbers of items, and a few examples will be provided. A special focus will be given to ESP items which were created and administered in order to assess the receptive skills.

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The Language Centre of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia has created its own authoring system for computerised language testing, starting from 2009. The advantage of having an authoring system is that it is flexible and can be used for several purposes since it allows for the creation of ‘tailor-made’ tests, thanks to a tagging system which is transformed into codes for the XML script. These codes correspond to different parameters, such as techniques (multiple choice, matching, multiple matching, gap-filling, reading comprehension, listening comprehension etc.), levels (A2, B1 etc.), language competences (pragmatics, lexis, grammar which can be assessed on more specific topics, such as tenses, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, modals, etc. by using the corresponding tags). Thanks to all these filters, it is therefore possible to select the items or types of items from the databank for a given purpose. This way, ‘tailor-made’ tests are able to satisfy the different needs which may arise on different occasions. Chapelle and Douglas (2006: 77) remind us that “Some testing practitioners are engaged in developing their own authoring software in order to achieve greater control over desired options.” Computerised language testing following the principles of best practice can represent an excellent example of economicity, objectivity, practicality, fairness and consistency. All these qualities, together with the great flexibility that an authoring system allows, led the University Language Centre to become involved in the creation and subsequent administration of an English computerised test for students attending a Masters course in international cooperation during the academic years 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. The language assessment was entrusted to the University Language Centre for budgetary reasons, which made it impossible to offer traditional lessons, namely with an instructor hired for the purpose who should have prepared, administered and corrected the exit exam too. Since this would have meant additional expenditure for the University, the Language Centre was therefore asked to provide support which cost no extra money for the University. Such support was represented by the creation of an exam syllabus, the offer of guided selfaccess study and web resources, and the administration of an exit exam. In particular, self-access facilities were represented by grammar and vocabulary textbooks, a piece of software called “Focus on grammar” (basic, intermediate, and higher-intermediate levels), textbooks for the Cambridge PET examination (used especially for the reading and the listening parts). The students were expected to pass a proficiency test (Hughes 1989: 910; McNamara 2000: 6-7) which was high-stakes (McNamara 2000: 48),

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since they were recognised University credits for their Masters course, and it was criterion-referenced (Hughes 1989: 17-19; McNamara 2000: 62-64), since they were asked to meet certain standards established a priori (i.e. a cut-off of 70%). The required standards were grammar and vocabulary competences, together with listening and reading skills at B1 level of the CEFR (2001). In particular, the two receptive skills were assessed via ESP (English for Specific Purposes) items, purpose-built for the students attending the Masters course. The item-writers involved in the creation of ESP items based their choice on topics which were appropriate to the curricula offered by the Masters course.

Masters course participants: a profile During the academic year 2009-2010 there were 29 students attending the Masters course, while in 2010-2011 there were 24, comprising a total of 53 participants over the two academic years. The profile depicted in the next few lines will take into consideration the participants of the two editions as a single group. The majority were women, as is clearly illustrated in Figure 1, with a gender distribution of 62% against 38%.

Figure 1

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The age distribution showed considerable variety, with ages ranging from under 30 to over 51. Figure 2 shows in detail the age range, with the highest percentage (58%) of Masters students represented by people aged 30 or less.

Figure 2

The Masters course was mainly held in Modena, apart from a short period of internship that the students could spend even abroad during their attendance. The analysis of the geographical distribution revealed that even if the majority of the participants were born in Italy (89%), 11% of them were born abroad (Figure 3). This means that it really was an international Masters course, not only in terms of future job perspectives (aid workers in international cooperation), but also in terms of the various origins of the people attending it (Albania, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, England and Ivory Coast).

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Figure 3

Among the participants who were born in Italy, a further distinction was made between the three traditional Italian areas: northern, southern and central Italy. Figure 4 shows that the majority (81%) were born in the north, 15% of the participants were born in the south and 4% of them were born in central Italy.

Figure 4

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The students attending the Masters course had different educational backgrounds which included economic studies (11%), humanities (11%), political sciences (9%), communication studies (9%), and engineering (6%). However, the highest percentage of participants came from the medical area (26%) including, among others, doctors, nurses, physiotherapists and psychologists. The label “other” (Figure 5) refers to another 26% of the Masters course students who had an educational background different from the ones mentioned above including, for instance, degrees in Law, Mathematics, and Pedagogy.

Figure 5

Computerised English exam As Carroll reminds us (1968: 46), a test is “a procedure designed to elicit certain behavior from which one can make inferences”. In this case, inferences were necessary in order to decide whether the future aid worker was autonomous enough when engaged on work abroad. This evokes the important issue of the social responsibility of the language tester, as forewarned by McNamara (2000: 70) when he states that “Recently, serious attention has been given to these issues for the first time.” The English exam for the Masters course students was delivered via computer, according to what is known as CALT, i.e. Computer Assisted

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Language Testing (Chapelle 2001; Chapelle / Douglas 2006). It was a standardised test in order to reduce or eliminate possible bias deriving from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, given that there were some Masters course participants whose first language was not Italian. The advantages of computerised language testing adopting principles of best practice have been widely discussed in the literature (Chapelle / Douglas 2006). One of them is represented by economicity of time and human resources, especially during invigilation and the later phase of test correction. Moreover, economicity is also guaranteed before the test administration because, for instance, there is no need for photocopies or shipping, since all the items are uploaded onto the University Language Centre testing database via a secure https protocol, accessible only to accredited users who have received access credentials. Computerised language testing is also recommended for its practicality. As a matter of fact, a large number of items were already present and available in the Language Centre testing databank, while others were purpose-built by English instructors with some knowledge of language testing and item writing. The new items concerned in particular the receptive skills of reading and listening and they dealt with topics, including current affairs, close to the participants’ interests and needs, with a view to their future job as international aid workers. This is why the items meant to measure reading and listening abilities were of the ESP type. It is also claimed (Douglas 2000) that ESP items can satisfy better the expectations of adults involved in courses of study, increasing their level of motivation, since ESP items are perceived as tasks with a higher level of authenticity. Once the item writers created and uploaded their exercises onto the platform, moderators analysed them. The process called moderation (Alderson / Clapham / Wall 1995; Heaton 1975; Hughes 1989) is extremely important since “it is simply impossible for any single individual to construct good test items without help from another person” (Heaton 1975: 182), namely colleagues with their “critical questions that may be asked” (Hughes 1989: 51). Moreover, moderation proves to be extremely useful in order to avoid ambiguities, for instance detecting more than one possible correct answer where only one was originally meant by the item writer. Ambiguity would represent the risk of possible unfair assessment and every institution involved in item writing for high-stakes purposes cannot ignore the great responsibility they assume in assessing test takers. This is what McNamara (2000: 72) defines as “accountability” which “has to do with a sense of responsibility to the people most immediately affected by the test, principally the test-takers, but also those who will use the information it provides.” This is why ethical issues

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(Kunnan 2000) are so important and must be seriously taken into account in language testing. Being a high-stakes test means that the institution administering the test has the power and the responsibility to decide on people, and therefore influence their future. In this case, University credits were recognised for the Masters course. Another positive aspect in CALT is represented by the possibility of item randomisation. Thanks to the large number of items present in the Language Centre database, randomisation was guaranteed and it helped prevent cheating among test takers, preserving testing security. Computerised language testing is objective too, since the computer corrects the testee’s answers. This means avoiding the risk of bias represented by human raters, with possible problems related to inter-rater and intra-rater reliability (Alderson / Clapham / Wall 1995: 129). As a matter of fact, scoring might be affected by the rater being tired at a certain moment during the marking process or by discrepancy among raters (e.g. the different way the Americans and the British use the present perfect). Naturally, the items must be unambiguous in order to have only one correct option in selected responses, such as multiple choice, gapfilling, matching, multiple matching etc. Since the computer corrects the answers given by the examinee, the correction phase is very quick, i.e. it is immediate. This means, once more, saving time and human resources. Moreover, in computerised language testing the assessment is consistent because test takers are all given the same testing conditions, in terms of timing, rubrics, parts of the test etc. (Chapelle / Douglas 2006: 22), while cutscore and item weights have been previously defined in the XML script, avoiding any possible risk of bias due to human raters. All this can be summarised in what is called “testing fairness”. The exam created for the students attending the Masters course in International Cooperation was meant to assess lexis, grammar, reading and listening at B1 level. This is the threshold level established by the CEFR and is the one which allows the future aid worker to “survive” while working abroad. The items used to measure competence in grammar and vocabulary were of the ESL type (English as a Second Language), while the items used to measure reading and listening abilities were of the ESP type (English for Specific Purposes).

Exam structure The exam was characterised by items of three different levels of the CEFR, starting from A1 to B1. However, the majority of the items were B1 level; items of an inferior level were meant as warm-up exercises in

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order to encourage test takers who did not have the chance of attending traditional lessons with an instructor of English. Table 1 can exemplify the exam structure in terms of techniques, CEFR levels, number of exercises, number of items per exercise, total number of items for each technique, and competence assessed. Technique

Level

# Exercises

# Items/ exerc.

# Items/ technique

Competence

Wordpool Multiple Choice Matching Gapfilling

A1 A1

1 3

16 1

16 3

A2 A2

2 1

4 4

8 4

Unscrambled Text Multiple Choice Multiple Choice / Image Multiple Matching Matching Matching Reading

A2

1

1

1

A2

3

1

3

A2

1

1

1

Lexis Grammar / Lexis Lexis Grammar / Lexis Coherence / Pragmatics Grammar / Lexis Reading Comprehension

B1

1

8

8

B1 B1 B1

1 3 1

4 4 5

4 12 5

Gap-filling Gap-filling Multiple Choice Listening

B1 B1 B1

3 1 3

4 4 1

12 4 3

B1

3

4

12

Reading Comprehension Grammar Pragmatics Reading Comprehension Lexis Grammar Grammar / Lexis Listening Comprehension

Table 1 The time allotted to test takers for this exam was 50 minutes. The cutoff score was set at 70% because a few exercises were of lower CEFR levels compared to the B1 level required for this proficiency test. In terms of marking, some techniques (e.g. multiple choice, unscrambled text) had a dichotomous marking, while others (e.g. gap-filling, listening, reading, wordpool, matching, multiple matching) had partial scoring.

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Items: a few samples In language testing an item is “part of a larger picture” (Fulcher / Davidson 2007: 63), namely a test or subtest, where each single one contributes both to the partial and to the final score of a test. This is why item writing can be considered to have a pivotal role even if it “has not received much scholarly attention and is not very well documented in the literature” (Dávid 2007: 67). The instructions for the exercises present in the University Language Centre database are standardised both in terms of content and in terms of language adopted. In particular, from level A1 to level B1 instructions are in Italian, while from level B2 to level C2 they are in the target language. This explains why in the following examples instructions are always in Italian. The first example shows the technique called “wordpool”, meant to assess lexis. There are three different lexical areas and sixteen words (i.e. items) to drag and drop into the correct area. There are no distractors and the marking is partial. Since the vocabulary measured is only at A1 level, the lexical areas are very basic, as shown in Figure 6 where topics such as nationalities, days of the week and months of the year are assessed. It is worth noting that attention was also paid to the choice of three lexical areas requiring an upper-case letter at the beginning of each single word. This way no cue was offered to test takers, even unintentionally.

Figure 6

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The next figure shows an exercise where lexis is assessed with the help of visual prompts, i.e. images. Among the various techniques present in this test, this is a first example of multimodal input, defined by Chapelle and Douglas (2006: 9) as a “powerful option that computers offer test developers […] potentially enhancing authenticity of both input and response.” There are four pictures and six words. Where necessary, in order to overcome the problems represented by the physical limits of monitor screens (Chapelle / Douglas 2006: 49), separate scroll bars are provided in order to see all the images and all the words. The test taker is asked to match each image to the only correct word, by dragging and dropping it. This means that there are four items, while the remaining two words are used just as distractors. In Figure 7 the vocabulary concerning jobs and professions is assessed; the level for these items is A2.

Figure 7

Coherence and pragmatics are assessed in the next example, where the test takers are asked to put into the correct order a brief dialogue by dragging and dropping each sentence, except the first one which is provided for contextualisation reasons. “Such a task […] adds significantly to the types of complex tasks that can be included on a language test” (Chapelle / Douglas 2006: 52). The level is A2 and the total number of sentences is always fixed (i.e. six). Figure 8 shows the dialogue presented by the computer with the sentences in randomised order, while Figure 9 shows the unscrambled text. Needless to say, item writers and moderators must avoid any ambiguity in reorganising the text, since only one correct order is acceptable, the scoring being dichotomous.

90

Figure 8

Figure 9

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It is worth noting that dialogues similar to the one presented in the Figures above are good examples of real language use situations (i.e. of the TLU domain) and therefore extremely useful for future aid workers actively engaged in their work abroad. Figure 10 shows another example of real language use situation. It is a multiple choice item, A2 level, supported by a visual, in this case a road sign. It is an example of realia since the road sign is a photo taken by the item writer while abroad. Test takers are asked to read the sign and prove their understanding of its message by clicking on the only sentence which paraphrases it. This item was particularly suitable for the Masters course participants attending the specialisation track “Disabilities”.

Figure 10

Real language use situations were presented at B1 level too, since pragmatic knowledge was considered an important skill for the future aid worker to possess. Figure 11 shows a matching exercise where four different pragmatic situations are provided and contextualised. The test taker is asked to drag and drop the only correct option for each situation. There are four items but the total number of options is six, since two of them are used just as distractors. The scoring is partial.

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Figure 11

Together with pragmatics, reading comprehension was also considered an important skill for the future aid worker to possess. That is why it played a major part in the language assessment of the Masters course participants. Figure 12 shows an example of reading comprehension measured using the technique called “multiple matching”, B1 level. On the left there are four short passages dealing with the same topic (travelling, in this case), while on the right there are eight options. Test takers are asked to match each option to the corresponding passage by dragging and dropping it. There are no distractors. Two separate scroll bars for both the passages and the options appear where necessary, depending on the text length compared to the physical limits of the monitor screen. The matching ratio is not necessarily 1 to 2; there may also be a ratio of 1 to 1 or of 1 to 3. This contributes to reducing the risk of guessing by exclusion, which is an important aspect considering that the marking is partial for this technique.

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Figure 12

Reading comprehension was also measured in a more traditional way, namely a passage followed by multiple choice questions. However, as Alderson, Clapham and Wall (1995: 43) have warned, “not all texts lend themselves to item development, and item writers are well advised to spend some time searching for texts that have promise.” The text length is comprised between 300 and 400 words because the required level of difficulty is B1. In addition, it is an authentic piece of reading, although it can be adapted in order to suit B1 requirements. There are five items (i.e. five multiple choice questions), each of them with four options but only one is the correct answer. Each item represents a fresh start for the test takers in order to avoid any possible bias in their assessment. If one or more items were interrelated (i.e. one depending on the comprehension of the other), a previous wrong answer might negatively affect the next one, causing bias (Alderson / Clapham / Wall 1995: 47). Items are meant to assess both reading for gist (skimming) and reading for detail (scanning). Moreover, the ability to infer the meaning of new words from the context is assessed too. The total scoring for this kind of reading comprehension is partial. It is worth noting that when creating the items for reading comprehension (and listening comprehension too), great attention was paid in order to avoid a situation whereby items failed to measure what they were supposed to measure. “This most frequently occurs in comprehension

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tests, where items may turn out to be testing background knowledge. It is unfortunately easy to write items which can be answered without any reference to the reading or listening passage” (Alderson / Clapham / Wall 1995: 50). In addition, “the exercising of receptive skills does not necessarily […] manifest itself directly in overt behaviour. […] The task of the language tester is to set reading and listening tasks which will result in behaviour that will demonstrate their successful completion” (Hughes 1989: 116). Finally, the reading comprehensions created for the Masters course participants provide an example of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) items. As a matter of fact, the topic presented in Figure 13 concerns “recycling”, which was of particular interest to the Masters course participants attending the specialisation track called “Planning and management of interventions” or the other one called “Emergencies”. It is worth remembering that during the years when the Masters course was taking place, the emergency concerning rubbish in Naples and the importance of promoting and spreading the culture of “recycling” were topical issues.

Figure 13

Figure 13 shows the text partially and only one of the five items. Test takers could see the remainder of the text and the other four items by using

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the two separate scroll bars. The words in bold in the text (i.e. downcycled, landfill) are examples of lexis which, although not commonly assessed at B1 level, here can represent vocabulary for specific purposes and test takers are asked to infer its meaning from the context. A question may arise concerning the reason why more than one technique (i.e. multiple matching, multiple choice) is used in the same test in order to measure the same ability (i.e. reading comprehension). The answer comes from Alderson (2000: 130) who states that “different tasks are designed to encourage different reading styles”, and therefore multiple intelligences can be promoted. He also states that “Good reading tests are likely to employ a number of different techniques […] across the range of texts tested” (ibid.: 206) and that among “[a]lternative objective techniques […] One objective technique is multiple matching.” (ibid.: 215). Another receptive skill considered important for this specific test construct (Alderson / Clapham / Wall 1995: 17; McNamara 2000: 13) was represented by listening comprehension. The technique chosen for measuring this ability was multiple choice, as outlined by Buck (2001: 142) who claims that “Selected responses can be of many types, but the most common is the multiple-choice item with 3, 4 or even 5 options.” The exercises created for the Masters course participants had four items each, and every single item had three options (i.e. two distractors and one correct answer). The total scoring for the listening subtest was partial. In listening comprehension too the items were meant to assess both listening for gist and listening for detail, together with the ability to make inferences from the context. Moreover, test takers were free to adopt their preferred strategy in order to perform the listening task, by deciding autonomously to either listen to the passage first and then read the questions, or vice versa (i.e. reading the questions before playing the recording). In terms of acoustics and background noise, CALT offers the best testing conditions for examinees since “computers […] deliver sound through individual headphones” (Buck 2001: 118). This means no risk of bias due to test takers sitting a long way from loudspeakers or from the instructor reading the passage aloud, or due to physical characteristics which are different among test takers engaged in the same listening comprehension task at the same time. The audio files, which represented another example of multimodal input, were about 2-3 minutes long and test takers could listen to each file no more than twice. In fact, the Language Centre authoring software intentionally imposed a limit on the maximum number of possible audio reproductions. Furthermore, it did not even give the opportunity to pause the recording or move it backwards and

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forwards. This was an intentional choice for reasons of authenticity. However, the debate (Buck 2001: 170-172) is still open among those who claim that there are several real-life situations where it is not possible to interrupt the speakers (e.g. on the radio, on TV, during train or flight announcements) and those who say that in real life there are situations where a listener can ask for repetition and/or clarification. As a consequence, asking an examinee to understand a listening passage without the chance of meaning negotiation would be an even harder task than in real life among native speakers, and therefore a non-authentic situation. Despite the unsolved debate, in the listening test for the Masters course participants a compromise was reached. The transcripts were authentic pieces of news, sometimes adapted because of the level of ability required (i.e. B1). This means that instructors working at the University Language Centre recorded the audio files themselves and their speaking speed was natural but not fast, since the skill of listening comprehension was measured at B1 level. In addition, when selecting the news to be recorded, the item writers focused on topics closely connected to the studies and therefore possible interests of the Masters course participants. This way they created ESP items for listening comprehension. Figure 14 shows an example dealing with the topic – “A new UN project to help women and children”, a topic of possible interest to the Masters course participants attending the specialisation track called “Planning and management of interventions”. As Buck (ibid.: 120) has observed: “The theme does of course need to be relevant to the testing purpose.” What was true for reading comprehension (i.e. giving test takers a fresh start) was also taken into account for listening comprehension. Furthermore, when writing the items meant to measure listening ability, attention was also paid to the fact that “[…] questions must be passage dependent, in the sense that they require something which can only be inferred by understanding the passage” (ibid.: 148). This concept is so important that Buck states it again when he says: “give test-takers simpler texts, but then give them tasks which require them to process the content in a reasonably realistic manner […] especially in the case of lower-ability listeners” (ibid.: 169, emphasis mine). He also suggests that “[p]robably the simplest way to make tasks easier is to allow listeners to hear the text twice” (ibid.: 151). In fact, this is what the Masters course test takers were allowed to do.

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Figure 14

In conclusion, the following lines report the transcript of the listening audio file presented in Figure 14. It is an example of a monologue, in particular a news item, in which case it is “likely to be semi-scripted or even fully scripted” (ibid.: 165), thus preserving authenticity: The United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon began a campaign in September to save the lives of over 16 million women and children, with more than $40 billion already promised by governments and organizations to improve health services around the world. “The 21st century must be different for every woman and every child,” said Mr. Ban Ki-moon. Millennium Development Goals were decided at an international meeting in Geneva. These objectives which must be reached by 2015 include a number of health objectives. Goal 4, for example, would reduce the mortality rate for children under the age of five by two thirds and Goal 5 would cut maternal mortality rates by three quarters. “We want to put women and children’s health first,” Mr. Ban Ki-moon told reporters after the launch. “The Millennium Development Goals mean more health for the money, and more money for health.” Between 2011 and 2015 Mr. Ban Ki-moon hopes to prevent the deaths of more than 15 million children under five, 33 million unwanted pregnancies and the deaths of 740,000 women from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth.

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Chapter Five To help guarantee its success many agencies, including UNICEF, a United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, the World Health Organization and the World Bank are collaborating to mobilize continuous political and operational support, including universal access to health care for all women and children. In addition, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations are working with this team to create better services for health needs. Thoraya Ahmed Obaid, Executive Director of UN Population Fund, spoke about the need to advance the health and rights of women worldwide. She said: “Women give a lot to their families, communities and nations. Now it is time to give back to women!” “To improve women’s health and achieve the health-related Millennium Development Goals, we need to change inequalities, make communities work better and improve health services,” she added.

Conclusions Despite the initial difficulties represented by a tight budget which meant no opportunity for traditional lessons and examination with a language instructor, the students attending the Masters course in International Cooperation during the academic years 2009-2010 and 20102011 received help from the Language Centre in order to revise or study for their English exam with web resources and self-access facilities. Since their Masters course curriculum required foreign language knowledge, the participants could prove they possessed such a knowledge thanks to a computerised language test specially created and run by the Language Centre itself. Such an exam could guarantee economicity while administering the test and again during the correction phase which was immediate because the items were all of selected response type. Since the computer corrected the tests, the assessment was fast and at the same time it was objective and fair, avoiding any risk of bias represented, for instance, by inter- or intra-rater inconsistency. This way reliability was guaranteed. Moreover, testing security was guaranteed thanks to the Language Centre’s authoring system which allowed for item randomisation. Finally, the Masters course students could do the test with a high level of motivation thanks to the inclusion of ESP items which better interpreted their needs and interests, as is endorsed by Douglas when he says that “An important concern in selecting input data for an LSP test is the degree of authenticity and specificity of the material” (2000: 57).

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References Alderson J. C. 2000. Assessing Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alderson J. C. / C. Clapham / D. Wall 1995. Language Test Construction and Evaluation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Buck G. 2001. Assessing Listening. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CEFR Council of Europe 2001. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll J. B. 1968. The psychology of language testing. In A. Davies (ed.), Language Testing Symposium: A Psycholinguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 46-69. Chapelle C. A. 2001. Computer Applications in Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapelle C. A. / D. Douglas 2006. Assessing Language through Computer Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dávid G. 2007. Investigating the performance of alternative types of grammar items. Language Testing 24/1: 65-97. Douglas D. 2000. Assessing Languages for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fulcher G. / F. Davidson 2007. Language Testing and Assessment. New York: Routledge. Heaton J. B. 1975. Writing English Language Tests. London: Longman Hughes A. 1989. Testing for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kunnan A. J. (ed.) 2000. Fairness and Validation in Language Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McNamara T. 2000. Language Testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER SIX DYSLEXIA AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE LEARNING IN ITALIAN PRIMARY SCHOOLS: ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF ENGLISH TEXTBOOKS SELENE RESCIO CA’ FOSCARI UNIVERSITY OF VENICE, ITALY

Introduction Development dyslexia has become one of the most widely investigated cognitive disorders. However, understanding dyslexia is a very difficult and complex task. This uncertainty is also mirrored in teachers who need to know how to successfully deal with dyslexic students, since learning a foreign language seems to be an extra load on them. Ganschow et al. (1998) show that difficulties in acquiring basic language skills in the mother tongue are closely related to difficulties in foreign language learning; however, they should not impede foreign language acquisition. In fact, it is important to give dyslexic students the opportunity to improve their knowledge of foreign languages so as not to accentuate their sense of exclusion. According to Nijakowska (2010), dyslexics require a direct structured multisensory instruction in the phonological/orthographic foreign language system, because the more modalities are involved in the learning process, the more effective it is. In this paper, a case study research is conducted in order to evaluate whether the most common English textbooks used in primary school in Italy are suitable for dyslexic students and whether they support a direct and multisensory instruction in English phonology and orthography. A brief outline of developmental dyslexia with its cognitive consequences will be given, followed by a presentation of the crucial role of teachers, according to the Guidelines on the Educational Rights of Students

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suffering from specific learning disabilities (SLD). Empirical findings on teaching materials will then be examined and discussed, showing that no book provides a completely effective reading programme suitable for dyslexics. Development dyslexia is a neurological-based learning disability. It is characterized by the inability to read fluently, despite the high general cognitive ability of the learners, the quantity and quality of instruction and intervention by the teacher (Lyon / Shaywitz / Shaywitz 2003). The main difficulty in dyslexia is connected with phonemic awareness, which is defined as “the ability to isolate and manipulate consciously the sounds of the language and relate them to the appropriate written letters or letter combinations” (Nijakowska 2000: 248). Dyslexics are unable to decompose words, to decipher the reading code based on the process of blending, to analyse sound segments and rearrange phonetic elements (Downey / Snyder / Hill 2000). Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and the reduced reading experience can subsequently prevent the growth of vocabulary and background knowledge. Indeed dyslexics’ chronological age and academic development do not often correspond to the expected reading ability for that age (Lyon et al. 2003). Apart from orthographic/phonological difficulties, dyslexics also have problems that reflect on language in general (Ganschow / Sparks 2000). Their reduced phonemic awareness may be sufficient for their native language (L1) but not for a foreign language (FL) (Ganschow / Sparks 1995). According to the Linguistic Coding Differences Hypothesis formulated by Ganschow and colleagues (1991), “the primary causal factors in successful or unsuccessful FL learning are linguistic; that is, students who exhibit FL learning problems have overt or subtle native language learning differences that affect their learning of a foreign language” (Ganschow et al. 1998: 248-249). Language skills in L1 are believed to provide the basic foundation for FL learning (Spolsky 1989), so L1 and FL learning processes are interrelated. It then follows that a deficit in the phonological component of the native language is even more threatening when a FL is to be studied. At the same time, language education development enhances individuals’ self-promotion, above all because English as a FL in contemporary society represents a crucial aspect in terms of social integration and working requirements (Daloiso 2012). Furthermore, the Guidelines on the Educational Rights of Students suffering from SLD, which form the basis of Italian law no. 170/2010, provide an exhaustive analysis of the new regulations and, most of all, exhort educators to reflect upon their crucial role in the formative development of students (Daloiso 2011). The Guidelines make it clear that

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teachers should help students suffering from SLD by means of personalized teaching plans and appropriate measures, which should take into account their special needs as a resource of enhancement of the teaching activities. Such plans should include a wide variety of teaching modalities, covering different learning styles and strategies, in order to make education development more accessible. Indeed, dyslexics do not suffer from cognitive deficits, but they need to be explicitly educated about the most appropriate learning strategies according to implicit difficulties related to FL orthographic and phonological features. FL is a crucial subject if it is used correctly, because it can also compensate for dyslexic children’s lack of motivation and self-esteem. Dealing in particular with English, the most commonly used language throughout much of the world, it should be highlighted that it is perceived also by native learners as a problematic language because of its irregular orthography, which could affect language acquisition in dyslexic students. The orthographic depth hypothesis formulated in Ganschow et al. (1991) shows that a ‘transparent’ language like Italian has a very clear lettersound correspondence, while a ‘deep’ or ‘opaque’ language is one which has a more complex phoneme-grapheme correspondence and more irregularities. This hypothesis clearly explains why students can learn some languages more readily than others, and it can be applied to all students, not only to those with dyslexia and other SLDs. Indeed, an Italian dyslexic student who learns the Italian written code can more easily decode any Italian word because of its shallow orthography. On the contrary, the main difficulties experienced in English learning are due to the large number of sounds in the phonological system of the language, and the different ways of writing the same sound (Kvilekval 2007). Furthermore, in English there are few transparent words and many homophonic words, i.e. they are produced with the same sounds but they are written in different ways. Recent research studies (Kormos / Kontra 2008; Schneider / Crombie 2003; Nijakowska 2008, 2010) demonstrate the essential role of FL learning, emphasizing the importance of the FL written form. In view of the main difficulties directly related to dyslexia, an accessible teaching methodology is required, with an emphasis on the following key aspects: ¾ systematic and cumulative factors: school lessons need to be planned systematically and the organization of materials has to follow the logical order of the language, e.g. from the easiest and most basic concepts to more difficult ones;

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¾ multisensory teaching approaches: the use of a variety of learning pathways in the brain (visual, auditory, kinaesthetic-tactile) represents a compensative learning tool for dyslexics to enhance memory and retrieve language information; ¾ direct phonological instructions: inferential learning cannot be taken for granted and language instructions should be direct, enhancing the development of strategies aimed at recognizing, processing and memorizing FL features; ¾ segmentation: the slower learning rate of dyslexics has to be considered: it is important to present the single parts of the language and to teach how the parts work together to form a whole; ¾ meta-cognition: dyslexic students need to learn by means of compensative strategies, considering the lifelong nature of their learning problems. Therefore, an accessible teaching methodology should be promoted in order to facilitate the FL learning process by dyslexic students. A process consisting of precise theoretical and methodological choices should be developed by the teacher in order to ensure equal opportunities for language learning for all the students, dyslexics and non-dyslexics. Teaching methods should take into account the importance of accessibility of dyslexics within the educational system. This should be taken into consideration in the programming and management of the lessons as well as in the choice of the teaching materials, which should be critically evaluated by the teacher in order to facilitate the learning process and ensure the accessibility of instruction to SLD students. In this paper, a case study research is conducted in order to evaluate whether the most common English textbooks used in Italian primary schools are suitable for dyslexics. In particular, this study explores whether or not they support a direct and multisensory instruction in phonology and orthography and investigates the degree of accessibility of teaching materials, providing detailed descriptions of the operational methods adopted by the books. Empirical findings on teaching materials will be examined and discussed in order to better understand the types of methodological approach and, if needed, to propose possible adjustments that should be implemented to facilitate a multisensory approach suitable for dyslexics. As for the analysis of teaching materials, we decided to analyse paper books because they are still the most commonly used instruments in schools for the transmission of knowledge. Furthermore, they are extremely useful resources to promote age-appropriate topics and

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to define the sequence of contents and the growth of language skills. The following books are examined: ¾ Treetops Plus by Sarah Howell and Lisa Kester-Dodgson (Oxford University Press); ¾ The Magic Book by Mariagrazia Bertarini and Paolo Iotti (Eli Editore); ¾ English Lab by Elettra Carloni, Anna Cavalletti and Elena Lucchini (Nicola Milano Editore).

Method This study exploits a qualitative methodological approach. To better analyse the real ‘accessibility’ of textbooks, an analytical approach but also a comprehensive and integrated approach are required. The analysis of the features is conducted by using a grid with 66 features that a book should have in order to minimize literacy difficulties. The grid is organized into seven categories, including features such as layout, structure of teaching units, multisensory activities, range of extra resources offered, reading, spelling and grammar activities. Each feature is evaluated by assigning a score based on a Likert scale from 1 to 5. The choice stems from the need for detailed data, from the clarity of the response categories and the choice offered (Lalla / Facchinetti 2000). The numbering 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 has the specific function of ordering the possible answers for each entry: 1 ) very low, 2 ) inadequate, 3) sufficient, 4) good, 5) very good. The final score is the sum of all the partial scores corresponding to each category based on the choice made. According to Lalla and Facchinetti (2000), the Likert scale responds to the principles of: ¾ unidimensionality – the items used in the scale refer to the same concept or property; ¾ equidistance between the response categories – the number of five responses provided by the scale may be arbitrary, but it is also simple, and reduces the zero variability. Each textbook has first obtained an analytical assessment relating to each category and then an overall assessment. This methodology has allowed us to study separately all the categories considered, giving the opportunity to highlight positive and negative features for each book.

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Results The analytical assessments relating to each category will be briefly presented and then the overall results will be discussed. For each category the optimal characteristics expected are introduced and then weaknesses and strengths are discussed. The first feature that we analysed, which is also the most relevant for a dyslexic student, is the LAYOUT of the page. A textbook layout matches the needs of dyslexic students if it is well structured, i.e. the text should not be too dense because if the page is ‘crowded’ a dyslexic student may have difficulty in reading. Fonts should be large and clear, with wide linespacing, and visual cues are required to help students to understand written material. Furthermore, the background colour of the page is important for dyslexics: a white background could cause discomfort and interfere with reading. Preferable colours should be fairly bright, e.g. cream or pale blue. In the textbooks examined it has been found that font and line-spacing are adequate for dyslexics, and in our grid the three books received very good ratings. Unfortunately, the page background colour has not been highly rated because it does not seem to respect the needs of dyslexics: English Lab and Treetops Plus have completely white backgrounds, while The Magic Book uses white and coloured backgrounds. As for the amount of text per page, The Magic Book pages often seem to be very crowded, while the use of colour cues to highlight and bring out morphemes and the elements of a sentence is a strategy exclusively implemented by Treetops Plus, in particular for phonetics and grammar activities. This is particularly useful for dyslexic learners because it can help them to comprehend the building-blocks of words in a clear way. Furthermore, it is very important to teach dyslexics to look for clues, such as headings, pictures, and words in bold. This is useful to gain an overview of the text and a general idea of the meaning. On the basis of these observations, we can confirm that the analytical assessment for LAYOUT is sufficiently positive for the three books, even if each textbook has peculiarities that the other two do not have. Treetops Plus (26/35) achieved the highest score, immediately followed by English Lab (24/35) and The Magic Book (20/35). An effective teaching method must be capable of incorporating new information in a context already known by the students, in order to activate their interest and curiosity. To facilitate this step, the teacher should establish routines: the textbook could be an important tool for surveying all stages of the learning process. For these reasons, the second feature we analysed is THE STRUCTURE OF TEACHING UNITS. The

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methodological approach of an effective unit should present the possibility of personalizing students' methods, which would help to highlight the different learning styles, and should propose a different degree of task complexity, with the aim of developing reading and spelling skills according to the student’s ability. The concepts in the unit should also favour a structured, sequential and cumulative approach which helps to make the learning process more meaningful and effective. Therefore, the teaching unit should be characterized by: o an introductory stage, also called warm-up activities, aimed at preparing the class activities. In this phase students' prior knowledge is effectively linked to the new linguistic information they are going to acquire. Warm-up activities facilitate the teacher's work by anticipating the content and diluting the amount of information to be learned without bearing down on the limits of working memory and on anxiety. Oral, visual and auditory activities are recommended. Using a wide range of learning pathways represents a compensative learning tool for dyslexics to enhance memory and retrieve language information. The title of the unit should be used as a starting point for a brainstorming session by recording all the information that emerges. In this way, metacognitive reflection and active participation of the student are stimulated. Furthermore, a good book should provide different kinds of concept maps, because they allow large amounts of information to be easily stored by presenting at a glance all the goals that should be learned in a unit. This is extremely important since dyslexics have serious difficulties in proceeding in sequence without a global vision. o A specific activities stage, in which practical and multisensory activities are proposed. In particular, content should be attached to visual media and visual cues to facilitate the storage process (Berton / Craighero et al. 2006). In order to deal with the deficit of working memory, a good textbook should contain clear text indexes and visually strong keywords. As for lexical enrichment, labelling activities is useful to increase understanding and reduce learning difficulties. Therefore, both the lexicon and the titles of the tasks should be translated into L1 as well. o A conclusion section, which should consist of a content review and of evaluation tests. Furthermore, self-assessment tests are also important, because they will lead the students to initiate a metacognitive reflection on their learning styles (Stella / Grandi 2011).

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Frequent recapitulation is a ‘must’ for students with dyslexia, who sometimes forget easily what they have learned earlier. For this reason, the book should offer extra activities to reinforce the content of the unit. The analytical assessment relating to THE STRUCTURE OF TEACHING is positive for all three books. The Magic Book achieved the best score (51/65), because it is the only one offering some pre-reading activities. Indeed, the very first page of each unit is structured as follows: there is a clear title combined with visual cues and photographs, which anticipate the topic of the unit. Additionally, an empty space is offered in the same page, where the students can write down their brainstorming activities or some sentences related to their personal experiences. This is particularly useful for global thinkers like dyslexics who prefer to see things within the context of the larger picture (Turner / Pughe 2003). Very good scores (5/5) were assigned to all three books for the entries concerning the organization of the teaching unit. Indeed, all the books have a clear routine that is repeated for each unit, well-structured exercises organized by difficulty, CLIL activities that allow cross-links with other subjects, and visually strong keywords to facilitate students’ understanding. On the downside, no book provides a translation of the lexicon into L1. Only Treetops Plus (50/65) uses English for the titles of the tasks in the textbook and Italian for the titles of the tasks in the workbook. This book also provides language summaries to enhance the weak memory of dyslexics and includes the vocabulary and grammatical structures learned for each educational unit. However, these charts are not at the end of the teaching unit, as should be expected, but appear all together on the first page of the book. Meta-cognitive and self-assessment activities are totally absent in English Lab (42/65) but are very clearly thought out in The Magic Book which dedicates several pages of the workbook only to self-assessment forms. The setting is slightly different in Treetops Plus, where the self-assessment forms can be found in the teacher’s guide. The third feature to be analysed is MULTISENSORY APPROACH. Recent international research (Nijakowska 2008) has confirmed the positive effects of such an approach for dyslexic students, since the simultaneous activation of auditory, tactile, visual and kinaesthetic pathways supports the compensation of any possible difficulties. It is a key component in teaching dyslexics, because the information integrated through the pathways is not affected by deficits, leading to the development of language skills. The multimodal perception is more advantageous than the UNITS

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mono-modal perception, both in terms of quantity of information stored and in terms of learning rate (Wlodarski 1998). Furthermore, considering the psycholinguistic framework of dyslexia, the concept of "agreeableness” is crucial. Indeed, the use of a pleasant and playful teaching method can help dyslexics to reduce their anxiety in language learning. A multisensory approach is widely implemented in all three books examined. Treetops Plus achieved the highest score (25/25), followed by The Magic Book (23/25) and English Lab (23/25). The exercises offered in the three books aim to enhance and activate all the sensory pathways combined with a playful didactic element that makes the tasks enjoyable and fun. There are sections dedicated specifically to art, pictures and music. In particular, there are Total Physical Response activities (Asher 1969), i.e. activities which get the students to move in ways that respond to the teacher’s instructions. The use of technology is another very useful tool if combined with the traditional paper book and it is closely related to the last feature analysed. Indeed the use of technology contributes positively to multisensory teaching by providing more playful activities which results in greater motivation for the students, the integration of multisensory pathways (visual, auditory and kinaesthetic), and interactivity with immediate feedback and access to the reality of English-speaking countries. All the paper books are accompanied by activity books, CDs, DVDs and cards or posters to hang on the classroom walls during the lessons. In addition, all three books contain downloadable online material. This is in line with Italian law no. 133 of 6 August 2008 which establishes the introduction of the ‘mixed’ book, i.e. a book that consists of a paper part and a digital part. Technological support represents therefore crucial EXTRA RESOURCES that should be integrated with the paper book. The exploitation of technology is particularly evident in Treetops Plus (50/60) with an analytical assessment greatly superior to The Magic Book (37/60) and English Lab (27/60). Indeed, Treetops Plus is the only one that provides iTools, i.e. a series of activities that the students can perform online by accessing a specific website. On this website students can create animated stories and can carry out further consolidation exercises. Furthermore, a website designed specifically for parents is also provided where they can follow their children in the learning of English, and where it is possible to find helpful tips and activities to be carried out with children. Additional materials are also offered such as an activity book entirely in digital format and a visual dictionary or picture dictionary, which is part of the portfolio of each student.

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As stated previously, a truly effective reading program should include direct and explicit teaching of phonetics and correspondences between letters and sounds. The activities aimed at enhancing phonological skills promote the correct development of reading skills. In doing so, students should be able to identify and manipulate sounds in various positions in the word (beginning, middle, end), always favouring a multisensory approach. In teaching phonetics, it is also recommended that we enhance the auditory and the visual pathways (for example by clapping hands and by using boxes, blocks, and cards). Auditory and visual representations help students in counting, segmenting and blending syllables and in conceiving phonemes as separate entities. Given the importance of direct phonetics instructions, the READING ACTIVITIES feature is also analysed. The analysis of the books shows that none of the three provides direct phonetics instructions to enhance the phonological awareness of dyslexics. Indeed they present reading activities by using images, short texts, listening activities or reading songs. In particular, as regards pronunciation exercises, Treetops Plus achieved the highest score (38/60), mainly because of its sufficient attention to phonetic nuances. For example, it proposes tasks which contain tongue-twisters to be listened to and repeated by the learners. Thus, it allows the practice of the same sound through the use of audio devices and different colour clues. Another example is the exercise Watch my lips reported in the teacher’s guide, which allows the learner to understand how to articulate sounds. The teacher has to mouth a word silently and students should be able to guess the right word through the movements of lips and tongue. The Magic Book (29/60) instead proposes the activity called Let's tune in!: it is an exercise aimed at acquiring the correct pronunciation of a whole sentence, and to learn which words have to be stressed in the phrase. However, before grasping a whole sentence image, which relies on the weak sequential memory of dyslexics, the students should be helped by clues to work out the word to be read. English Lab (28/60) obtained the lowest score, because it proposes only one exercise called Look and Speak where a student has to watch a picture and say the word related to it without any verbal or multisensory support. Reading and writing processes are highly interrelated, although they involve different skills. In fact reading is a decoding skill, while spelling is an encoding process. The latter is more problematic for dyslexics, because it requires an awareness of phoneme-grapheme correspondence, good auditory discrimination and an accurate mental imagery in recalling words. These features are weaknesses in a dyslexic profile. Improvements and accuracy in spelling can be helped by phonemic segmentation and

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phonemic fusion, by checking the sequential order of phonemes in words containing consonant clusters, diphthongs etc. Spelling activities become more logical and predictable in students with a good phonological awareness, i.e. students who know how letters relate to each other, why vowels are important and how to recognize rhymes. The following discussion is about SPELLING ACTIVITIES. The very first step in studying an opaque language like English is to teach explicitly the reasons why words are spelt the way they are, and to provide students with strategies in order to recognize sounds. Many teachers count the syllables orally or write the word on the blackboard for the student to copy. This approach is not effective since all the strategies should cover multisensory teaching. An example could be the so-called technique of visual inspection: LOOKSAY-COVER-SAY-WRITE-CHECK (Turner / Pughe 2003). This method is widely used in Great Britain, and requires the students to read a word and pronounce it aloud. Then the word is covered and the student must pronounce it aloud again, this time without looking. Finally, the word is written and compared to the original, to make sure it has been spelt correctly. Analysis of the data shows that the single activities proposed by all three books are just anagrams and crossword puzzles. Treetops Plus is the only one that proposes further consolidation activities, referring to the strategies mentioned above, such as LOOK-SAY-COVER-SAY-WRITECHECK activity and the use of colour clues to identify different graphemes. Another effective strategy to aid spelling is the use of mnemonics: these devices are colourful and visually strong and utilize the right hemisphere of the brain where many dyslexics have strengths. None of the books provides different kinds of activities or explicit instructions about the opaque spelling of English, even though direct spelling instructions give a simple structure and logical approach to building words which rely on the strength of good reasoning skills that many dyslexics possess. The analytical assessment for this category is inadequate for The Magic Book (13/50) and English Lab (17/50), but it is sufficient for Treetops Plus (24/50). Dyslexic students need direct instructions also to develop grammatical awareness in a foreign language (Nijakowska 2007). Therefore the last category of our grid analysis is represented by GRAMMAR ACTIVITIES. The limits of dyslexia can be reduced through pedagogical interventions that lead the student to focus on the form of words. Thornbury (1999) emphasizes the need to highlight linguistic elements in order to help students recognize them and to accelerate the language acquisition process. Grammar is important to be able to master a language, and therefore the study of grammar should not be regarded as an end in itself,

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and in no way should be seen as a boring and demotivating experience. Grammar can be taught by using colour coding and visual pegs. Dyslexic students may have problems, because the study of grammar involves name/symbol correspondence, which is an area of weakness for them. We must allow students to learn the parts of speech, through a multisensory, sequential and structured way. The data in this category show that the fundamental concepts of English grammar are presented by a clear setting and layout in all the books. Furthermore, they propose language games to facilitate and motivate the learning of grammar. Only Treetops Plus offers additional types of exercises (i.e. sentence manipulation, sentence matching, the use of colour cues to mark syntactic categories) that should reinforce the learning process. This book also facilitates grammar awareness development by signalling the theory of reference at the top of the exercise pages. For this reason, in the analytical assessment, Treetops Plus achieved the highest score (29/30), followed by The Magic Book (14/30) and English Lab (13/30).

Discussion and conclusions Children with dyslexia frequently struggle when learning a foreign language, especially a language with an opaque orthography such as English. Therefore the teacher has a major responsibility, because s/he has to be a reference point for students and a stimulus for the learning process. The recent regulatory framework exhorts teachers to reflect upon their essential role in the formative development of students. Indeed, according to the Italian Guidelines, teachers have to write personalized teaching plans, and to adapt their teaching methods to learners’ special needs. Furthermore, they have to implement a critical evaluation of the teaching materials in order to facilitate the learning process. The research presented in this paper investigated the approach exploited in common English textbooks used in Italian primary schools, to verify their strong and weak points in teaching accessibility and to better understand the types of methodological adjustments that might be implemented. On the basis of the data analysis (see Table 1), only Treetops Plus (242/325) promotes a reasoned choice of teaching material and aims at improving the effectiveness of learning in all contexts. English Lab (174/325) and The Magic Book (187/325) do not take into account criteria such as accommodation and accessibility of teaching methods, although they present many strong points, such as a good layout for English Lab and a good structure of the teaching unit for The Magic Book. Treetops Plus pays particular attention to the use of multimodal texts and

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technologies, and offers a high variety of effective grammar activities for all contexts by using colour clues, visual aids and language games. It pays sufficient attention to English phonological and spelling structures, but not even Treetops Plus provides direct, structured and multisensory instructions in the phonology and orthography of English. The book lacks explicit instructions aimed at the grapheme-phoneme correspondence, and activities to enhance phonological skills and facilitate the proper acquisition of reading skills.

Layout Structure of teaching units Multisensory approach Range of extra resources Reading activities Spelling activities Grammar activities

Treetops Plus

English Lab

The Magic Book

26/35 50/65 25/25 50/60 38/60 24/50 29/30

24/35 42/65 23/25 27/60 28/60 17/50 13/30

20/35 51/65 23/25 37/60 29/60 13/50 14/30

242/325

174/325

187/325

Table 1: Overall assessment of the results for each category analysed After careful analysis and observation of the learning activities proposed by Treetops Plus, we can say that this book is a valuable teaching aid even for special education needs. It bases its methodological approach on the notion of inclusive education that values and promotes the differences in a foreign language classroom. It provides document templates to build personalized study plans, using the material of the book. Moreover, the Portfolio activities are designed to allow children with different abilities to work according to their potential. Furthermore, they can be easily adapted to all, even if some methodological adjustment needs to be implemented. However, a truly effective language program should include direct and explicit teaching of phonetics and of correspondence between letters and sounds, especially when teaching an opaque language like English. According to the analysis, it was found that the most widely used textbooks in primary schools are not sufficient in phonetics and spelling activities, so the teacher has to supplement the educational path with target activities. It is important to emphasize that even non-impaired Italian students encounter problems with reading the English language. Indeed, they use the phonematic method, because of the

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shallow orthography of Italian: letters or sounds are first taught in isolation, then in sequences as phonemes and then as words, without knowing the rules that underlie the English phonological system. Therefore not only students with dyslexia but the whole class would benefit greatly from multisensory teaching approaches, characterized by direct phonological and orthographic instructions. Finally, the assessment grid specifically created for this work could be a valid and effective tool for educational professionals of all levels, because it contains the necessary features that a book should contain to be more suitable for a struggling/reluctant reader who has dyslexic difficulties.

References Asher J. J. 1969. The total physical response approach to second language learning. The Modern Language Journal 53: 3-17. Berton M. / M. Craighero / L. Grandi / A. Meloni / M. Peroni / E. Savelli / N. Staffa / G. Stella / G. Lampugnani / F. Ciceri / V. Dazzi 2006. Strategie e tecnologie per l'apprendimento. Dislessia 3: 295-307. Daloiso M. 2009. I fondamenti neuropsicologici dell'educazione linguistica. Venezia: Cafoscarina. —. 2011. Linee-guida glottodidattiche per l'attuazione delle nuove norme sui disturbi specifici di apprendimento. Scuola e Lingue Moderne: 4-5. —. 2012. Lingue straniere e dislessia evolutiva. Teoria e metodologia per una didattica accessibile. Torino: UTET Università. Downey D.M. / L.E. Snyder / B. Hill 2000. College students with dyslexia: persistent linguistic deficits and foreign language learning. Dyslexia 6: 101-111. Ganschow L. / R. Sparks 2000. Reflections on foreign language study for students with foreign language learning problems: research, issues, and challenges. Dyslexia 6: 87-100. Ganschow L. / R. Sparks 1995. Effects of direct instruction in Spanish phonology on the native-language skills and foreign-language aptitude of at risk foreign-language learners. Journal of Learning Disabilities 28/2: 107-120. Ganschow L. / R. Sparks / J. Javorsky 1998. Foreign language learning difficulties: a historical perspective. Journal of Learning Disabilities 31/3: 248-258. Ganschow L. / R. Sparks / J. Javorsky / J. Pohlman / A. Bishop-Marbury 1991. Identifying native language difficulties among foreign language

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learners in college: a ‘foreign’ language learning disability? Journal of Learning Disabilities 24: 530-541. Kormos J. / E.H. Kontra 2008. Language Learners with Special Needs. An International Perspective. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kvilekval P. 2007. Insegnare l’inglese ai bambini dislessici. Un modo sicuro per tutti. Firenze: Libri liberi. Lalla M. / G. Facchinetti 2000. Inferential fuzzy system for rating instruction. Economics and Complexity 2: 31-56. Lyon G. R. / S.E. Shaywitz / B.A. Shaywitz 2003. Part I. Defining dyslexia, comorbidity, teacher’s knowledge of language and reading. A definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia 53: 1-14. Nijakowska J. 2000. Dyslexia – does it mean anything to a foreign language teacher? In L. Peer / G. Reid (eds), Multingualism, Literacy and Dyslexia: A Challenge for Educators. London: David Fulton: 248256. —. 2007. Taming grammar. The Teacher 8-9/51: 19-25. —. 2008. An experiment with direct multisensory instruction in teaching word reading and spelling to Polish dyslexic learners of English. In J. Kormos / E.H. Kontra (eds), Language Learners with Special Needs. An International Perspective. Bristol: Multilingual Matters: 130-157. —. 2010. Dyslexia in the Foreign Language Classroom. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Schneider E. / M. Crombie 2003. Dyslexia and Foreign Language Learning. London: David Fulton. Spolsky B. 1989. Conditions for Second Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stella G. / L. Grandi 2011. Come leggere la Dislessia e i DSA. Conoscere per intervenire. Firenze: Giunti Scuola. Thornbury S. 1999. How to Teach Grammar. Harlow: Longman. Turner E. / J. Pughe 2003. Dyslexia and English. London: David Fulton Publishers. Wlodarski Z. 1998. Psychologia uczenia sie (Psychology of Learning). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.

PART THREE: NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN TEACHING LANGUAGE FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES

CHAPTER SEVEN ON FINDING AN APPROPRIATE APPROACH TO ESAP TEACHING ROBIN ANDERSON UNIVERSITY OF MILAN ‘BICOCCA’, ITALY

Some background information on the origins of ESP It is fair to say that English language teaching has always been teaching for special purposes. However, since the 1990s the branch of English language teaching (ELT) known as English for Special Purposes (ESP) has grown to become one of the most important areas of ELT today. This is mainly as a response to technological advances, particularly the Internet, the rapid spread of globalisation and the accompanying spread of English as the language of international communication in social and economic contexts and to greater worldwide professional mobility which has brought an increase in vocational language training. English has achieved a global language status and this phenomenon has made it imperative that many non-English-speaking countries develop English language proficiency in their own citizens. The development of ESP from its beginnings in the 1960s has been widely documented: see Strevens 1988; Robinson 1980; Coffey 1984; Swales 1988; Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998 and S. Benesch 2001. However, despite its long history the ESP community has not been able to agree on what ESP exactly means and what ESP teaching involves. Dudley-Evans and St. John attempted to classify the events and actions which typify ESP into three stable, absolute characteristics and five variable characteristics. The absolute characteristics are (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998:4-5): 1. ESP is defined to meet specific needs of the learners 2. ESP makes use of underlying methodology and activities of the discipline it serves 3. ESP is centred on the language appropriate to these activities in terms of grammar, lexis, register, study skills, discourse and genre.

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ESP caters for learners who are learning the language in order to communicate a set of professional skills or to perform particular jobrelated functions. Therefore ESP practice varies from one context to another and an ESP programme might emphasize the development of reading skills over, for example, verbal communication (Benesch 2001: x). ESP concentrates on language as it is typically used in specific professional contexts rather than on teaching grammar and language structures per se. Subject-specific knowledge is assumed to be present in the students’ existing knowledge and it is assumed that the subject matter knowledge gives them the context they need to understand the English presented in the ESP classroom. Learners are also assumed to be highly motivated. Hutchinson and Waters (1987: 19) state that “ESP is an approach to language teaching in which all decisions as to content and method are based on the learner's reason for learning.” Therefore a fundamental aspect of an ESP approach is that teaching practices and materials are based on the results of a needs analysis. For Dudley-Evans (2001) the key questions are: x What do students need to do with English? x Which of the skills do they need to master and how well? x Which genres do they need to master either for comprehension or production purposes? However, among ESP practitioners there is no agreed definition of the term ‘need’ itself. The perception of a student’s needs will depend on who is making the judgement; teachers, learners, educational administrators, or employers. Therefore it would seem reasonable to state that what distinguishes ESP courses from general English language courses is the “awareness of the learners’ needs” (Hutchison / Waters 1993: 53). As materials selection is carried out based on the learner’s perceived communicative needs in a given professional context, ESP practitioners and coursebook writers have tried to ensure the professional authenticity of course content by introducing authentic materials into the ESP classroom. The use of authentic texts was reinforced by the growth of communicative language teaching, and for many language teachers the benefits of using authentic materials in ELT have been proved beyond question (see Shrum / Glisan 2000; Richards 2001; Lin 2004; Kilickaya 2004; Harding 2007). The rationale for the use of authentic texts in ESP was further strengthened by developments in learning and discourse theories, especially genre theory. Bhatia (1993: 13), basing his definition on the work of Swales (1990), defines genre as follows: “it is a recognisable communicative event

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characterised by a set of communicative purpose(s).” Genre analysis brought an awareness of the importance of the socio-rhetorical context of language production, distribution and consumption, and the notion of discourse community which underlines the socially situated nature of discourse; the communicative purposes of the discourse are “identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs” (Bhatia 1993: 13). Kilickaya (2004), considering various definitions of what constitutes authenticity, concluded that “what is common in these definitions is exposure to real language and its use in its community.”

The development of ESAP English for Academic Purposes (EAP) emerged from ESP mainly due to the large increase in the number of foreign students entering universities in English-speaking countries and universities in which the language of instruction was English, at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The increase was caused mainly by mass migrations to the US and Canada and here in Europe, largely due to the Bologna Declaration of June 1999. The Bologna Process launched the European Higher Education Area and set in motion a series of reforms to make European higher education more competitive and attractive for European students and students from other continents. Recognition of qualifications obtained abroad is achieved by means of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) which was introduced in 1989 within the framework of the Erasmus/Socrates programmes (over 3 million individual participants since its inception). Institutions publish their course descriptions which contain learning outcomes (i.e. what students are expected to know, understand and be able to do in the target language) and the workload (i.e. the time students typically need to achieve these outcomes). Each learning outcome is expressed in terms of credits. The Bologna Process does not aim to harmonise national higher education systems but to provide tools to connect them, therefore higher education providers remain autonomous institutions. Universities based outside English-speaking countries began to offer courses taught in English in order to attract this flux of newly mobile students. And this led to a notable increase in EAP courses, materials, methodologies and coursebooks, aimed at specific disciplines such as English for engineering, English for nursing and even, more recently, English for job-hunting.

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Traditionally EAP practitioners assumed their role to be that of preparing students by focusing on the skills required for their future study needs. The expectation was that the EAP class would facilitate student understanding of the course content when taught in English. It is “the portion of the curriculum which prepares students for gainful involvement in study situations” (Anthony 1997: 56). Critics of this approach argued that EAP was now seen as a ‘service course’ to the official academic course. EAP was also criticised for placing less emphasis on research and theory and more on course planning and instruction (see McDonough 1984). But as Benesch (2001: 34) points out, this focus on syllabus design, instruction and teaching materials over research and theory has allowed EAP to “become increasingly responsive to the complexities of institutions, teaching, and learning in local contexts”. However, for many researchers and practitioners, EAP is still a contested field. Carkin (2005) identifies two sub-divisions of EAP; English for General Academic Purposes, EGAP, sometimes referred to as a common-core approach, and English for Specific Academic Purposes ESAP, sometimes referred to as a subject-specific approach. Put simply, EGAP involves the acquisition of general academic language, as well as study skills including strategies for reading, writing, speaking and listening effectively, which are deemed transferable across different academic disciplines. These skills are seen as a “key component of EAP” (Jordan 1989: 88). ESAP focuses the learners on language skills specific to a particular subject of study (see Jordan 1997: 5). Hyland questions whether there are any linguistic skills and features of language which are transferable across different academic disciplines and asks whether we should focus on the specific texts, skills and language forms appropriate to distinct disciplines and their particular discourse communities. For Hyland this aspect of specificity is a determining factor in ESAP course design and content (Hyland 2006: 912).

The instructional context As Benesch (2001: 21) points out, EAP is “situated” and therefore requires “context-sensitive curricula”. Being sensitive to context involves consideration of the institutional setting, the students and issues related to the academic discipline itself and how these might impinge upon methodologies, course design and classroom activities. The learning/teaching context I have chosen to consider for this paper is teaching ESAP in non-language faculties in Italian universities, where the subject-specific classes are taught predominantly in Italian.

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Reforms in the Italian education system over the last 50 years have had consequences for foreign language teaching in non-language faculties, which has suffered a downgrading in status and importance. The nature of this downgrading is often manifested in the reduction of the number of university credits allocated to languages and therefore a reduction in the number of classroom contact hours. Of five masters’ programmes in one faculty of Economics, only one has language credits which carry a final grade, on the other four masters’ programmes students acquire an evaluation of ‘suitable’ / ‘appropriate’, i.e. a simple ‘pass’ without a grade. Coffey (1984: 3) comments that one specific need of EAP students may be a “quick and economical use of the English language to pursue a course of academic study”. His observation referred to students attending degree courses which were taught in English, but this might also be true of our context, in which most courses are taught in Italian and the ESAP course simply constitutes credits to a final total, or is a required subject to be completed as part of the masters’ or bachelor degree course. So although ESAP is part of the formal curriculum, it nevertheless remains on the periphery of university courses. Other major changes are often to be found in the amount of time allocated to ESAP courses in tertiary education. Languages are usually placed on one year of a first degree course, where once they were offered in all three years. These developments are manifestations of what Turner (2004: 96) calls a “short-cut mentality”, where the idea that time is money takes precedence over the belief that time is an intellectual investment. This attitude seems set to prevail as universities struggle to function with the increasingly limited financial resources they are alotted. However, this short-cut approach radically underestimates the time and intellectual endeavour it takes to really achieve proficiency in a second language and creates a perception in the students’ minds that short-cuts to second language learning do exist.

The instructional context – the institution Are ESAP practitioners “reluctant dwellers in a strange and unchartered land” (Hutchison / Waters 1987: 158)? Is the experience of teaching ESAP intimidating as some linguists suggest (see Belcher 2006)? Institutional factors, such as available facilities, classroom space, timetabling and the relationship of the language course to its immediate, discipline-specific environment, will impinge upon and limit the practitioner’s choice of objectives, course content, methods of instruction and his/her ability to assess and accommodate learners’ needs and indeed

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might make the experience intimidating (see Dudley-Evans / St John 1998; Hutchison / Waters 1987). While Dudley-Evans and St. John’s (1998) division of ESP into absolute and variable characteristics can be helpful in resolving theoretical arguments about what ESP is and what it is not, it is debatable how useful such a check-list is if we apply it to many ESAP teaching/learning contexts. We are indeed often in uncharted land. In our chosen context many of the traditionally accepted defining characteristics of an ESP course cannot be applied. This seems particularly true for the needs analysis, which for most researchers is “the cornerstone” (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998: 122), “the starting point” (Jordan 1997: 22), the “means of establishing the how and what of a course” (Hyland 2006: 73). However, researchers and practitioners have pointed out the difficulties in carrying out an accurate needs analysis, as the techniques used are often determined by the teaching context (Kuzborska 2011: 224) and any definition of learners’ needs would vary depending on who was making the judgement; teachers, administrators or the students themselves. So there are three problems related to needs analysis; who carries it out, what is included and excluded and how it is carried out. The motives behind institutionalised needs analyses have also been questioned, suggesting that the needs assessments carried out and the subsequent courses offered have less to do with teaching and learning and more to do with institutional issues such as time, numbers of students, timetabling, rooms and money. Turner (2004: 96) states that a short-cut mentality is endemic in EAP and that “that maximum throughput of students with minimum attainment levels in the language in the shortest possible time was the conceptual framework within which EAP was conceived”. Moreover, despite the fact that many research papers on ESAP relate collaborations between the subject specialists and the practitioner, it is rarely possible to involve the subject specialists in determining learners’ needs or to assist in the English language programme design: no doubt, as Hyland (2006: 11-12) points out, for reasons of time and opportunity, rather than volition. However, it can also be a consequence of the widely accepted opinion that ESAP is simply a mapping of English onto already existing cognitive structures, a notion which has been rigorously challenged, notably by Robinson (1980) and Swales (1988). Subject specialists often believe that there is no necessity for collaboration, that language is “a decontextualised skill that can be taught in isolation from the production of meaning” (Zamel 1998: 253). The assumption is often that the ESAP practitioner can produce and teach courses which develop language without involving subject-specific content.

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Collaborations involving the ESAP practitioner and the subject specialist that have been documented and seemed to prove successful are, however, particular to and products of the institutional context in which they happen. As Benesch (2001: 133) points out: ‘I do not think the results of my experiments are transferable to other settings’. The above seems to strengthen Hyland’s challenge to the ESAP practitioner to construct “personal, context-specific frameworks which allow him or her to select and combine compatible procedures and materials in systematic ways for a local context” (Hyland 2006: 89). Therefore, while accepting Hyland’s (2006: 73) claim that learners’ needs are “the central element of ESAP course design”, I argue that, following the above considerations, it falls to the ESAP practitioner to make the initial assessment of what the learners’ needs are likely to be and that this assessment of learners’ needs evolves as the course progresses and classroom practices are validated through a constant process of reflection and evaluation by the ESAP practitioner (see Nunan 1987: 13).

The wider instructional context The assumption that language skills can be gained easily and quickly has in part been created and maintained by years of commercial activity aimed at selling language courses, methods, materials and exams. It is perhaps pertinent that today the fastest growing area for commercial language proficiency tests is in ESP. There is therefore a growing demand for easily measurable and easily processed language tests. In the tertiary system, these tests are often mapped onto existing university criteria, as pre-requisites for entry to university courses, or as equivalents to university credits in a second language, thereby substituting or competing with internal university tests and exams which were previously part of the professional domain of the institution and the ESAP practitioner. This proliferation of short cuts can distort students’ perceptions of what is entailed in really knowing a language and “the complexities in engaging in the specific literacies of the disciplines” (Hyland 2006: 12). External exams, with their commercial need to be as widely applicable as possible, underspecify the subject-specific language and skills and fail to give students a sense of the wealth of complexity involved in subject-specific discourse. Hyland (2006: 89) points out that “principled teaching is not about prepackaged methodological products”. The ESAP practitioner needs to reclaim his/her role in setting objectives and designing course content and be wary and sceptical of short cuts, pre-packaged methods, materials,

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activities and evaluations of outcomes. Curricular decisions are “underpinned by a sensitivity to the contexts of teaching” (Hyland 2006: 30). There is therefore a great need for pragmatism on the part of the ESAP practitioner, a middle way which takes into account the limits the learning context sets upon course design and classroom practices.

The middle way It seems that there are two conflicting realities, the need for disciplinespecific materials and the practitioner’s lack of discipline knowledge and its discourses, so it is necessary to find a ‘middle way’ (Hyland 2006: 9). The ESAP approach being proposed is a parallel approach where the ESAP course follows the curriculum of the target discipline and presents parallel content focusing on the lexico-grammatical and text features typical to the subgenre. I have argued above why it is often necessary that it is the ESAP practitioner who evaluates learners’ needs, sets course objectives, designs course content, methods and activities and evaluates outcomes. In doing so, the ESAP practitioner will be taking on a diversity and multiplicity of roles (see Robinson 1991: 1; Kennedy / Bolitho 1984: 138), many of which will be restricted by the learning/teaching context in which the ESAP course is carried out, precluding some of these roles and emphasising others. The ESAP practitioner therefore needs to reappraise his/her roles in the light of the learning context in order to create realistic course aims and objectives. Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 4-5) identify five key roles for the ESP practitioner: x x x x x

teacher evaluator collaborator researcher course designer and materials provider.

The middle way – ESAP practitioner as motivator and evaluator The classes we meet on our ESAP courses are usually large in number and are composed of students with differences in linguistic and disciplinespecific knowledge. They differ in age and personal motivation, and they come from a variety of social and ethnic backgrounds, thereby providing an environment which is culturally, socially and linguistically diverse.

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This poses problems for the ESAP practitioner as these “variations in language level, prior education […] can be accommodated only to a certain extent” (Gatehouse 2001). One area which may be affected in such a heterogeneous context is student motivation. An important role for a teacher in any teaching/learning situation is to address motivation. Often teachers rely on their interpersonal skills and their relationship with the group in order to do this, but the ESAP practitioner often needs to look to other ways to motivate. One such way is to make the pedagogical decisions transparent. Students need to be engaged in a visible pedagogy, where the rationale for texts and classroom activities is made clear to them and tasks are seen to link clearly to the overarching aim of developing the necessary lexis and reading skills to process at least one sub-genre of discipline-specific texts. Students are also motivated when the course is varied; courses which focus merely on receptive skills eventually become less appealing to students, and so language work should include receptive and productive skills. Also, practitioners need to be aware of Nuttall’s concern that studying only content area topics may sometimes result in monotony in class (Nuttall 2005: 177). Thus, introducing a variety of texts into the curriculum might be worthwhile, because varied texts could be more entertaining or engaging, hence motivating. The issue of intellectually challenging texts and tasks is often raised in the literature. Benesch makes the case for the intellectual commitment of the EAP teachers “rubbing off on their students”. She argues that the EAP practitioner should find one area of study that interests them and promote that topic as an object of inquiry. The visible intellectual engagement of the practitioner would be “a great stimulus for students” (Benesch 2001: 84). Ellis (1987: 212) suggests that one of the three major roles for a teacher is that of “onlooker”, where the teacher withdraws from the scene in favour of student-student activity, or student-task activity. This role serves as an opportunity for the ESAP practitioner to monitor students as they interact with the text and activities and with one another. In this way he/she receives feedback on materials and activities which then allows for reflection on classroom practices and enables the practitioner to better plan the materials and activities employed and the overall progress of the course. The role of onlooker/monitor will also allow for the possibility of teacher intervention in order to provide individual feedback and guidance. This is part of what Boomer calls the “demystification of learning”, included in which is the encouragement of students to ask questions, to speak up when they do not understand. Boomer (1992) goes on to say that

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this is a way of making students feel that they are not novices in the linguistic practices of the academic discourses, but active members.

The middle way – ESAP practitioner as researcher and knower In the absence of collaboration with the subject specialist the ESAP practitioner is required to become self-taught in the discipline’s knowledges and discourses, although as Spack (1988: 34) points out, “It seems that only the rare individual teacher can learn another discipline”. Realistically, the ESAP practitioner is not likely to become a specialist in the target discipline, or indeed, were he or she to develop some degree of specialisation, is unlikely to be regarded as such by colleagues teaching the discipline or by the students. The ESAP practitioner therefore needs to research the discipline as much as is reasonable to expect; to become a “knower” of the discipline’s content (Ellis 1987: 212; Turner 2001: 99). Specialist language teaching needs to have language as its centrality, “especially in written form” (Turner 2004: 95) and discipline-specific texts are typified by a high density of technical lexis, the acquisition of which along with “a suitable degree of relevant content and discoursal expertise” are prerequisites to membership of a discipline’s discourse community. As Swales (1990: 9) points out, “genres are the properties of discourse communities” which are “sociorhetorical networks that form in order to work towards sets of common goals”. Discourse communities are where genres make sense. However, as Hyland (2003: 23) points out, within discourse communities “[t]here is huge potential for internal heterogeneity of genres”, and Johns (1997: 154) reminds us that these discourses “are complex and evolving, conflicted and messy.” Therefore the ESAP practitioner needs to use his/her abilities to “explore academic worlds: their language; their genres; their values, and their literacies” (ibid.) in order to find a source which is a) suitable in the light of local context constraints, b) easily accessible to the students, c) appropriate in its linguistic and discipline-specific content, and d) a valid and authentic example of one of the discipline’s discourses (ibid.). In this way students are provided with exposure to and practice in processing at least one valid sub-genre of the discipline’s discourses, while having the possibility to develop their knowledge of the discipline content and how this particular source of the discipline’s discourse employs text and lexico-grammatical features in order to encode its ideas and values.

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The middle way – ESAP practitioner as course designer and materials provider Often “ESAP practitioners find themselves in a situation where they are expected to produce a course that exactly matches the needs of a group of learners, but are expected to do so with no, or very limited, preparation time” (Johns 1990: 91) or, as is often the case, produce a course that is expected to match the expectations and/or needs of the institution. Researchers and practitioners have likened this role to an intellectually and professionally inferior one, merely providing a service course to the main subject course (see Benesch 2001; Raimes 1991). The suggested parallel course approach, in which the assessment of learners’ needs and course and materials’ design is the responsibility of the ESAP practitioner, repositions him/her as an active professional with clear curricular goals and a visible pedagogical approach. The ESAP language classes follow the target discipline content, with authentic texts chosen from one area of the discipline’s discourses which function as genre models and tasks, and activities are designed to foreground the specific linguistic features employed to communicate the discipline’s ideas and values. As Callahan (2005: 2) points out: “Exposure to domain-specific language facilitates content-area understanding, bringing English learners to the academic forefront.” For many ESAP practitioners and researchers the most effective means of teaching language learners with academic needs is through contentbased instruction (see Freeman / Freeman 2003; Grabe 2009) and “the focus on language is more committed when the content is intellectually stimulating” (Turner 2004: 105). As Hyland (2006: 114) points out: “The teaching of specific skills and rhetoric cannot be divorced from the teaching of a subject itself”, and therefore the subject-specific authentic texts allow the ESAP practitioner to help students become familiar with the discipline’s typically recurring text and discourse features and helps to develop and reinforce content knowledge. By presenting students with intellectually challenging texts practitioners are positioning themselves “as active intellectuals whose curricular goals extend beyond merely propping up content courses” (Benesch 2001: 84). Benesch (ibid.: 80) urges teachers to respond unilaterally when it comes to materials choice and design, adding that “EAP teachers have institutional, social, and pedagogical perspectives, allowing them to make considered curricular judgements.” And the recent growth in Content-based Instruction (CBI) rests on the basic principle of the systematic selection of subject-specific course content and authentic

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texts (see Tarnopolsky 2009). Turner (2004: 97) points out the “failure to see that language grows with content leads to the insidious perception that measured language proficiency is all there is to the role of language on a degree course.” There is a growing body of research and practice which gives support to such approaches and the common factor is the importance of real language use in its own community (see Kilickaya 2004).

The middle way – the learners Making sense of a text is an act of interpretation which “depends as much on what we as readers bring to a text as what the author puts into it” (McCarthy 1991: 27). The ESAP course needs to provide opportunities for students to develop and extend areas of background knowledge; their linguistic schemata (their prior linguistic knowledge), formal schemata (their prior knowledge of formal, rhetorical and organisational structures of different kinds of texts) and content schemata (their knowledge of topic). Content schema includes previous cultural and domain-specific knowledge, which provide readers with the context from which they can process and understand texts (Carrell 2006). Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge. However, ESAP practitioners cannot “assume students’ previous learning experiences will provide the appropriate schemata and skills to meet course demands” (Hyland 2006: 17). As Starfield (1990: 87) points out: “few assumptions can be made about students’ scientific knowledge or their language proficiency.” And Allison (1996) points out that the quality of students’ involvement in classroom tasks is determined by their existing discipline knowledge. Following the approach we are suggesting, the ESAP practitioner makes initial assumptions about how much of the discourse’s linguistic, content and formal schemata are present in the learners’ background knowledge from which he/she designs a course and selects materials and activities. As the course progresses these decisions are revisited, reflected upon and revised, added to or excluded where necessary. Many researchers stress the need for this process of constant reflection and revision of assumptions and practices. Pennycook (1999: 345) states that “self-criticism is a crucial element” in ESAP teaching, involving “constant questioning about the types of knowledge, theory and practice, or praxis they operate with.”

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Conclusion As Benesch (2001: 130) says: “developing an ethics of EAP requires reckoning with how the field positions itself vis-à-vis institutions, programs, funding agencies, academic classes and students.” She is not optimistic about change as she would like to see it happen, citing financial restraints, especially on public-funded institutions, growing class sizes, the growth in standardised language testing, and what she calls “the speededup climate of the information age”, all of which she says, limit the possibility of dialogue and depth of presentation and investigation of language and content (ibid.: 133). The approach outlined here reflects the original conception of ESP in that it concentrates on texts and language and provides intellectually challenging texts and activities appropriate to a particular discipline (Halliday et al. 1964). The approach does not presume to teach content in the same way that the discipline specialist would do; the parallel ESAP courses should be a place of intellectual endeavour where, as Turner (2004: 95) points out, the language/content dichotomy is no longer seen as language being subordinate to content, but language as constitutive of content.

References Allison D. 1996. Pragmatist discourse and English for academic purposes. English for Specific Purposes 15: 85-103. Anthony L. 1997. English for specific purposes: what does it mean? Why is it different? On-CUE 5/3: 9-10. Belcher D.D. 2006. English for specific purposes: teaching perceived needs and imagined future worlds of work, study and everyday life. TESOL Quarterly 25/2: 297-314. Benesch S. 2001. Critical English for Academic Purposes: Theory Politics, and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bhatia V.K. 1993. Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. Boomer G. 1992. Negotiating the curriculum. In G. Boomer / N. Lester / C. Onore / J. Cook (eds), Negotiating the Curriculum: Educating for the 21st century. London: Taylor and Francis: 4-15. Callahan R.M. 2005. Tracking and high school English learners: limiting opportunity to learn. American Educational Research Journal 42/2: 305-328. Carkin S. 2005. English for academic purposes. In E. Hinkel (ed.),

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Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 85-98. Carrell P.L. 2006. Evidence of a formal schema in second language comprehension. Language Learning 34/2: 87-108. Coffey B. 1984. ESP: English for special purposes (State of the article). Language Teaching 22/2: 23-86. Dudley Evans T. 2001. English for specific purposes. In R. Carter / D. Nunan (eds), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 131-136. Dudley Evans T. / M. St. John 1998. Developments in ESP: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis R. 1987. Classroom Second Language Development. New York: Prentice Hall. Freeman Y. / D. Freeman 2003. Struggling English language learners: keys for academic success. TESOL Journal 12/3: 5-10. Gatehouse K. 2001. Key issues for ESP curriculum development. TESL Journal. At http://iteslj.org/Articles/Gatehouse-ESP.html. Grabe W. 2009. Reading in a Second Language: Moving from Theory to Practice. New York: Cambridge University Press. Halliday M.A.K. / A. MacIntosh / P. Strevens 1964. The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longman. Harding K. 2007. English for Specific Purposes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutchison T. / A. Waters 1987. English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchison T. / A. Waters 1993. English for Specific Purposes: A Learning-centered Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hyland K. 2003. Genre-based pedagogies: a social response to process. Journal of Second Language Writing 12: 17-29. —. 2006. English for Academic Purposes: An Advanced Resource Book. New York: Routledge. Johns A.M. 1990. Process, literature, and academic realities: the contribution of Daniel Horowitz. JALT Journal 12/1: 29-36. —. 1997. Text, Role and Context; Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johns A.M. / T. Dudley-Evans 1991. English for specific purposes: international in scope, specific in purpose. TESOL Quarterly 25/2: 297-314. Jordan R.R. 1989. English for academic purposes. Language Teaching 22/3: 150-164.

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Jordan R.R. 1997. English for Academic Purposes: A Guide and Resource for Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kennedy C. / R. Bolitho 1984. English for Specific Purposes. Hong Kong.: Macmillan. Kilickaya F. 2004. Authentic materials and cultural content in EFL classrooms. The Internet TESL Journal. At http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kilickaya-AutenticMaterial.html. Kuzborska I. 2011. Links between teachers’ beliefs and practices and research on reading. Reading in a Foreign Language 23/1: 103-129. Lin Y. 2004. The effect of authentic materials on motivation and reading achievement in EFL learners in Taiwan. At http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/ER/detail/hkul/3018938. McCarthy M. 1991. Discourse Analysis for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDonough J. 1984. ESP in Perspective: A Practical Guide. London: Collins ELT. Nunan D. 1987. The Teacher as Curriculum Developer: An Investigation of Curriculum Processes within the Adult Migration Program. South Australia. National Curriculum Resource Centre. Nuttall C. 2005. Teaching Reading Skills in a Foreign Language (3rd ed.). Oxford: MacMillan. Pennycook A. 1999. Introduction: critical approaches to TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 33/3: 329-348. Raimes A. 1991. Instructional balance: from theories to practices in the teaching of writing. In J. Alatis (ed.), Georgetown University Roundtable on Language and Linguistics. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Richards J.C. 2001. Postscript: ideology of TESOL. In R. Carter / D. Nunan (eds), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson P. 1980. English for Specific Purposes. London: Pergamon Press. —. 1991. ESP Today: A Practitioner’s Guide. New York: Prentice Hall. Shrum J. / E.W. Glisan 2000. Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction. Boston: Heinle and Heinle. Spack R. 1988. Initiating ESL students into the academic discourse community: how far should we go? TESOL Quarterly 22/1: 29-52. Starfield S. 1990. Language and science: a new look at some old issues. South African Journal of Higher Education 4/2: 84-89.

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Strevens P. 1988. ESP after twenty years: a reappraisal. In M. Tickoo (ed.), ESP: State of the Art. Singapore. SEAMEO Regional Centre: 113. Swales J. 1988. Episodes in ESP. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall International. —. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarnopolsky O. 2009. Content-based internet-assisted ESP teaching to Ukrainian university students majoring in psychology. The Reading Matrix 9/2: 184-197. Turner J. 2004. Language as academic purpose. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 3/2: 95-109. Zamel V. 1998. Strangers in academia: the experience of faculty and ESL students across the curriculum. In V. Zamel / R. Spack (eds), Negotiating Academic Literacies: Teaching and Learning across Languages and Cultures. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 249-264.

CHAPTER EIGHT ONLINE CASE-BRIEF BANKS IN ELP CLASSES: AUTHENTICITY, RELEVANCE AND TASK DESIGN MICHELA GIORDANO UNIVERSITY OF CAGLIARI, ITALY

Introduction Previous studies have discussed why case briefs are one of the disciplinary tools American Law School students are required to master in the first year of their course curriculum (Sullivan / Colby / Wegner / Lloyd / Shulman 2007; Giordano 2012). Not only can case briefs be considered an academic genre promoting out-of-class preparation to gain background knowledge, but they can also provide useful practical training for the apprentice to the legal profession. Moreover, they endow students with the ability ‘to think like lawyers’ and develop the skill to reason and argue as professionals do in the context of the various branches of Common Law practice (Bhatia 1993; Hyland 2000; Candlin / Bhatia / Jensen 2002; Sullivan et al. 2007). The present study endeavours to investigate whether and to what extent American online student case briefs could be employed in English for Legal Purposes classes in university and language centre environments as authentic materials through which L2 students can acquire the necessary skills which would enable them to compare different legal systems and practices. Exploring the various branches of law will help students gain an understanding of difficult legal cases, as well as master the appropriate generic behaviours and discursive conventions of the legal community. Taking into consideration the concept of the authenticity of materials not written for pedagogic purposes, their relevance to the discipline and the features of the discourse community within which such texts are produced (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998; Swales 1990), this study investigates how a learner-focused approach

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based on both genre and corpus analysis can be a valuable guide to teacher task design. Customised tasks, based on a case-method of learning and matched to learners’ needs, might effectively help students to improve their language skills while simultaneously fostering their assimilation of the epistemology of their future professional discipline (Berkenkotter / Huckin 1995). A brief is a summary of an appellate court opinion. However, a distinction must be made between two types of brief: an appellate brief or brief is a long written document, sometimes twenty pages long, put forward by attorneys or lawyers to the appellate court. The appellant tries to convince the court that errors were made by the trial court in reaching its judgment and the appellee will try to demonstrate there were no significant errors. The parties’ arguments are presented through the appellate brief. A law student brief or case brief, on the other hand, is a learning tool, generally a single page document that analyses “one particular case opinion in a formulaic way” (Schelin undated). It succinctly summarizes “the relevant facts, the legal issue presented, and the reasoning the court used to reach a decision” (Garner / Newman / Jackson 2002: 333). In North American Law Schools, students usually study cases by briefing or summarizing them, especially while attending the first semester modules. The case briefs, or summaries, follow the structure of professional appellate law briefs. The practice of briefing cases as a learning and teaching tool began at Harvard Law School in 1870 when Professor Christopher Columbus Langdell introduced the case method. Case briefing is nowadays a widely accepted pedagogical method among law instructors in the majority of American Law Schools. Some lecturers assign case briefs as preparation before class, so that students can gain understanding of a particular case before discussing it in class using the Socratic case-method training. During the course of this study, many American university websites were investigated to ascertain whether instructors actually use this kind of learning tool and whether or not a single standard for case briefing exists. Among the numerous definitions, one was chosen to better explain what case briefing represents in American Law Schools. The webpage of Donald L. Carper, Professor Emeritus of Business Law and Conflict Management at California State University Sacramento includes an appendix on case brief and gives the following explanation: Its purpose is to have students identify the rules of law found in court cases and analyze how courts apply these rules of law to the facts of a case

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in an objective and rational manner. Case briefing hones analytic skills and heightens understanding of the role of courts in defining, interpreting, and applying law (). For the analysis in question, a corpus of American students’ case briefs will represent the textual material on which an English for Legal Purposes module can be built and developed for L2 students, taking into account various factors such as their value as authentic and relevant instances of specific discourse and their adaptability and flexibility for task design. Dudley-Evans and St John (1998: 92) explain that even Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995: 2-3) “argue for an approach based on ‘case research with insiders’ investigating the ways in which writers use the genre knowledge that they acquire ‘strategically’ to participate in a discipline’s or a profession’s activities”.

Theoretical framework, aims and data The present study will be based on some seminal works on genre and academic discourse such as Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993), Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995), and Hyland (2000), which provide useful insight into disciplinary communication and academic writing. Essential understanding of the nature of students’ case briefs was gained from the work Educating Lawyers. Preparation for the Profession of Law by Sullivan, Colby, Wegner, Lloyd and Shulman (2007) and from a previous investigation on contract case briefs in American Law Schools (Giordano in Berkenkotter / Bhatia / Gotti 2012: 377-396) which entailed an analysis of the situational and institutional context and the generic move structure of these types of texts. Taking the previous studies as a starting point, the several tasks and activities created for this study are based on the influential works on ESP by Robinson (1991) and Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) and on legal writing materials for English learners by Candlin, Bhatia and Jensen (2002). Additional knowledge on the use of corpora in the ESP classroom was gathered from works that deal with corpus-based teaching methodologies such as Gavioli (1997), Thurstun and Candlin (1998) and the integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches applied to text analysis in ESP such as the work by Flowerdew (2005). As Belcher (2009: 3-4) points out, ESP course designers collect and examine data, usually in the form of sample texts, from the target community or from community insiders. Then ESP specialists proceed with discourse-sample analysis by considering, ideally, both macro(rhetorical, whole text) and micro- (lexico-grammatical) level characteristics

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of the written or spoken genres, i.e. routine communicative events. As is widely known among L2 teachers and instructors, chosen materials should meet the general objectives of the lesson and, equally importantly, might be slightly beyond the learners’ level to increase their motivation, awareness and curiosity. Additionally, the data which will be used as materials in class should be chosen according to the learners’ interests and should be relevant to their needs. ESP course designers should also look at the potential adaptability of materials so that no difficulty is encountered in task design and text manipulation for the creation of learning activities. Once the data is selected, the tasks to be created should be sequenced and differentiated and should include both communicative and cognitive procedures. In order to ensure the students do not become discouraged or demotivated, the length of the texts selected should not be intimidating or unapproachable. The present study aims to investigate whether and to what extent American online students’ case briefs can be employed as authentic materials in English for Legal Purposes classes in university and language centre environments. It will be argued that through their analysis in class, L2 students can attain the skills that are necessary to properly explore differences and similarities between the legal systems and practices in the USA and in their own country and achieve a sound knowledge and awareness of the various discursive strategies at work in such texts. L2 students in countries where the legal system is not Common Law are certainly not expected to produce such types of texts, case briefs or other texts typical of the American Law School tradition and curriculum. However, exploring the various branches of law will help students gain an understanding of difficult legal cases, as well as master the appropriate generic behaviours and discursive conventions of the legal community. Taking into consideration the concepts of the authenticity of materials and their relevance to the discipline and the features of the discourse community within which such texts are produced (Dudley-Evans / St John 1998; Swales 1990), this study will endeavour to investigate whether a learner-focused approach based on the integration between genre and corpus types of analysis can be a valuable guide to teacher task design. It is argued here that customized tasks that are tailor-made by instructors who bear in mind the case method of learning and learners’ specific needs might in actual fact help students to both improve their language skills and assimilate the epistemology of their future profession (Berkenkotter / Huckin 1995). The website is the source for the data under scrutiny here. It contains 1,974 case briefs in total, summarizing cases

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from several specific legal fields, and in particular from common first year courses such as Contracts, Torts, Property, Criminal Law, Civil Procedure, Trusts and Wills, and Constitutional Law. The website includes other resources for students such as a career centre, a legal reference section, some information on student life and important resources for the Bar Exam. The K case briefs corpus 1. 1st Baptist Church v. Barber 27. Callano v. Oakwood Park Constracting Co. Homes Corp. 2. Acme Markets Inc. v. Federal 28. Capital Dodge Sales v. Northern Armored Express, Inc. Concrete Pipe 3. Acme Mills & Elevator Co. v. 29. Carbtree v. Elizabeth Arden Johnson 30. Carlill v. Carbolic Smoke Ball Co. 4. Agricultural Insurance Co. v. Constantine 31. Carter v. Sherburne 32. Centex v. Home Corp. v. Boag 5. Allied Steel and Conveyors, Inc. v. Ford Motor Co. 33. Central Adjustment Bureau, Inc. v. Ingram 6. Anglia Television Ltd. v. Reed 7. Austin Instrument, Inc. v. Loral 34. Channel Home Center, Division of Grace v. Grossman Corporation 8. Bailey v. Ewing 35. Cheney v. Jemmett 36. Cirafici v. Goffen 9. Bailey v. State of Alabama 10. Bailey v. West 37. Clark v. Elza 11. Bain v. Gillispie 38. Cohen v. Clayton Coal Co. 12. Batsakis v. Demotsis 39. Cohen v. Cowles Media 13. Beall v. Beall Company 14. Beard Implement Co v. Krusa 40. Colonial Dodge v. Miller 15. Blair v. Anderson 41. Continental Laboratories v. Scott 16. Board of Control of Eastern Paper Co. Michigan University v. Burgess 42. Corinthian Pharmaceuticals v. 17. Board of Ed District No. 220 v. Lederle Labs Village of Hoffman Estates 43. Corthell v. Summit Thread Co 18. Boone v. Coe 44. Cotnam v. Wisdom 19. Bovard v. American Horse 45. Cousineau v. Walker Enterprises, Inc. 46. Cumbest v. Harris 20. Branco Enterprises v. Delta 47. Cyberchron Corp v. Calldata Roofing Systems Development, Inc. 21. Bright v. Ganas 48. D & G Stout, Inc. v. Bacardi 22. Britton v. Turner Imports, Inc. 23. Burger King v. Family Dining 49. D&G Stout Inc. v. Bacardi 24. Burger King Corp. v. Weaver Imports, Inc. 25. C. Itoh v. Jordan 50. Dalton v. Educational Testing 26. C. Itoh & Co. v. Jordan Int’l Co. Service

Table 1. The K case briefs corpus

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The Kcorpus (K stands for contract) selected for the present study includes 50 contract case briefs. The case briefs selected were the first 50 in a list of 213 contract case briefs submitted to the website by different students, as shown in Table 1. The K case briefs are numbered progressively following the actual order on the website as it was up to March 2013. Some of the case briefs in this corpus were already part of the above-cited previous study (Giordano 2012): the present study analyses and utilizes them with a different, didactic aim. Word count in the K case briefs corpus Case brief

# of words

Case brief

# of words

Case brief

# of words

K01

545

K19

235

K37

417

K02

390

K20

465

K38

233

K03

358

K21

490

K39

200

K04

200

K22

218

K40

526

K05

420

K23

897

K41

385

K06

262

K24

210

K42

802

K07

389

K25

410

K43

313

K08

538

K26

263

K44

270

K09

231

K27

361

K45

545

K10

519

K28

563

K46

212

K11

404

K29

461

K47

392

K12

298

K30

219

K48

413

K13

559

K31

562

K49

290

K14

332

K32

338

K50

271

K15

432

K33

393

K16

518

K34

165

K17

559

K35

545

TOTAL

19,516

K18

251

K36

247

Average

390.32

Table 2. Word count in the K case briefs corpus Although created and developed with a first language context in mind, the case briefs in the online bank can represent a very useful computermediated resource bank from where ESP teachers and instructors can draw

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texts containing many features of potential value in second language contexts (Candlin et al. 2002: 302). Regarding data produced by native speakers, Robinson underlines that “what native speakers produce in the appropriate situations is truly authentic and thus suitable as a model and target” (1991: 32). Table 2 shows the number of words for each case brief. The data were computed by using Wordsmith Tools 5.0, devised by Mike Scott at Liverpool University. The shortest case brief in the subcorpus contains 165 words ([K34]), and the longest 897 ([K23]). This difference in length is due to the type of case, of course, but also to the fact that students uploading case briefs on the websites attend different law schools, and case briefs can follow a number of formats and have different lengths depending on the level of analysis required by the instructor. The data amount to about 19,000 words and the average length for a case brief is 390 words. As can be seen from Table 2, the texts under investigation are relatively short, the majority being shorter than one page. This represents a motivating and encouraging factor for L2 students who are thus not intimidated by lengthy, elaborate or intricate texts.

Integrating genre-based and corpus-based analysis in task design Giordano (2012) observed that case briefs can be considered as an independent genre, inasmuch as they exploit specific characteristics and rhetorical features typical of both academic practice in American Law Schools and professional legal practice. They clearly show a consistent use of shared rules and conventions and common textual features, such as a specific (though flexible) move structure, based on the IRAC legal method of analysis where Issue, Rule, Application and Conclusion are the main moves. Candlin et al. (2002: 303) explain that there are many variations on this approach; drawing on their work, Giordano (2012) shows various examples of different formats. Nevertheless, the IRAC structure remains the standard for case briefs and this confirms its value and usefulness as an analytical and organization tool. Case briefs as writing assignments allow law students to develop their cognitive competence by dwelling on conceptual models, schemata, logic or causal relationships, by analysing, ordering, ranking, and matching elements. Writing assignments such as case briefs force law students to read the case carefully in order to analyse it in writing and explain it to their classmates and lecturers. In this sense case briefs can be seen as a pedagogic genre.

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As regards their content relevance in an L2 context, case briefs contain terminology, concepts and linguistic complexity that reflect the ESP students’ background knowledge and meet the general objectives and students’ individual goals along with their practical, skill-building requirements. According to Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 27) “The exact meaning of authenticity has often been unclear.” They explain that “Many have used it with reference to unsimplified or ‘genuine’ texts that were used in ESP materials but were originally written for purposes other than language teaching. Others have recognized that genuineness of the text does not guarantee relevance and that a text is only truly authentic if it is exploited in ways that reflect real world use” (ibid.: 27-28). Therefore, when considering case briefs as authentic materials to be used in the classroom, certain factors have to be taken into consideration, such as their level of applicability and adaptability in terms of task design and ease of text manipulation. The case briefs bank affords the opportunity to focus not only on the organization and content of the legal document (genre), but also on the crucial issue of the link between particular lexicogrammatical and discursive choices and organization and content (Candlin et al. 2002: 308), building a bridge that connects law to language. One of the greatest advantages of utilizing these types of authentic texts is that a large number of tasks can be designed. The tasks proposed here are intended for B2 level students, preferably studying Law at university or attending an ELP course to improve their competence in the language and acquire specific discourse which will be useful in their professional career. But how can a case brief be exploited in an ELP classroom? The tasks can be organized into various steps: 1) Pre-reading or warm-up stage including preview questions relating to personal background or personal knowledge of the topic; 2) While-reading activities such as filling in the blanks, word search, matching of definitions, rephrasing exercises, cloze procedures, contextual reference; 3) Post-reading tasks such as reading comprehension questions, multiple choice, true/false, wrap-up and concluding summaries. These are traditional tasks and activities which can certainly be utilized to provide a sense of familiarity given the novel nature of the materials being presented. Some exercise examples can be provided by matching and gap-filling tasks to boost the use of new and unknown lexical items and the understanding of their specific meaning in the context of contract case briefs, as is shown in Task 1 and Task 2 below. Task 1 was created

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utilizing case briefs [K04], [K15], [K17], [K35], [K48] and [K49] in the corpus. Task 2 is based on [K04]. Task 1 Matching: Match the words in the first column with their definition in the second column. 1. bailee

a. property owner, landlady or landlord in a lease agreement

2. bailor

b. the person who has become obliged through a promise towards another

3. lessee

c. the person who receives property through a contract of bailment

4. lessor

d. the person who temporarily transfers possession of property, under a contract of bailment

5. promisee

e. resident, rentee, renter, tenant in a contract of lease

6. promisor

f. the person who is to be the beneficiary of a promise, an obligation or a contract

Task 2 Gap Filling: Fill in the gaps in the text below with the missing words. [K04] Summary of Agricultural Insurance Co. v. Constantine Parties: Plaintiff: Agricultural Insurance Co. Defendant: Constantine contract of bailment bailee

bailed property bailor (x2)

Reasoning: The court states that lacking the assent of (1) _______________ to the conditions printed on the ticket before delivering her car to the (2) __________________, it cannot be a part of the (3) ________________. And (4) ________________ only considered the ticket is a token or receipt ostensibly for later identification of the (5) _______________, which cannot constitute a part of the contract.

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While Task 1 and Task 2 focus on lexical items and their definition and meaning in the specific context and thus work on the lexical and semantic level, Task 3 and Task 4 below are more discourse-based and engage students in the reordering of events narrated in the introductory Facts category of the case briefs, emphasizing the importance of coherence and cohesion in text. The Facts utilized are drawn from [K22] for Task 3 and [K09] for Task 4. The two tasks require the students to use certain cognitive skills when chronologically sequencing the various events. This is carried out both on the basis of logical or temporal connectors when present, or on that of the Facts content, which explains the several legal steps of a particular lawsuit that will eventually lead up to the appeal. Task 3 Re-order the Facts of the case brief below in the right chronological sequence. [K22] Britton v Turner Case Brief Plaintiff: Britton (worker) Defendant: Turner • • • •

Facts: Britton sued for the work he had done, and the jury awarded him $95. But plaintiff, having no good cause, left that service without defendant’s consent. Plaintiff contracted defendant to work one year, from March 1831 to March 1832, for the payment of $120. But no evidence offered of any damage arising from the plaintiff’s departure.

Task 4 Re-order the Facts of the case brief below in the right chronological sequence. [K09] Summary of Bailey v. State of Alabama Parties: Plaintiff: Bailey Defendant: State of Alabama Facts: x x

The Supreme Court confirmed the judgment. Riverside paid $15 as a consideration.

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Bailey sued. Bailey ceased the work without just cause after working through January and three or four days of February and refused to refund the money. Plaintiff contracted The Riverside Co. (Riverside in brief) to be farm hand from Dec. 30, 1907 to Dec. 30, 1908 for the sum of $12.00 per month. The Montgomery City Court found the accused guilty under the statute, fixed the damages sustained by Riverside at $15 and assessed a fine of $30.

The above are just some examples of how case briefs or parts of them can be manipulated in order to create challenging tasks for students. Nevertheless, the advantage of using such authentic materials lies in the possibility to experiment other ways of analysing and interpreting the texts, i.e. tasks can be derived from the combination of genre-based and corpus-based text analysis. This results in a new approach which is 1) 2) 3) 4)

learner-focused data-driven tailor-made discovery-oriented.

The approach is learner-focused and tailor-made in that it implies the creation of tasks which are calibrated to the type of students in class, to their level and their specific knowledge of the content matter. To make materials more interesting and more effective for L2 law students it would be desirable to “introduce more creative rhetorical devices. These might include writing samples, examples, exercises, diagrams, figures, charts, illustrations, or tables” (Candlin et al. 2002: 306) where students are required to fill in missing information that can be gleaned from skimming and from an intensive reading of the materials. Additionally, corpora and corpus analysis techniques based on data can be exploited in an L2 classroom to draw students’ attention to real examples of language use and “foster discovery learning by autonomous exploration and principled analysis of authentic evidence” (Pinna 2006: 57). The data-driven procedure can certainly be based on the students’ investigation of concordance lines which would “enhance their knowledge of English and awareness of the complex interplay between words and their co-texts” (Pinna 2006: 58). Being a bottom-up approach, it is more inductive. Flowerdew (2005: 324) explains the criticism against this type of “somewhat atomized” investigation which could be seen as being at odds with the top-down process based on the genre approach to text analysis which the students would undertake through the exploration of whole texts and their generic features. It is strongly believed that the

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integration of the two approaches, genre-based and corpus-based, will promote students’ autonomy by putting them at the centre of the learning process and simultaneously raising both their linguistic and legal content awareness. Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 31) state that “[w]ith the advent of computer-based corpora and the development of the ideas of genre analysis, it is possible to relate the quantitative data that emerge from computer analysis, especially from the use of concordancing programs […] to discoursal features of text.” Thus the novel approach for ESP students can be the integration of genre analysis and corpus analysis to the analysis of texts: ‘novel’ in the sense that we can get students themselves to conduct such (guided) analysis on the available material. This does not mean simply giving students direct access to the data produced by the computer, but the aim is to make the students become “research workers”, adept at categorizing occurrences, identifying regularities and making generalizations from them (Gavioli 1997: 33-34).

Case brief generic moves Looking at the organizational structure of a case brief, students can discover that there are some fundamental elements which are common to all briefs, namely: 1. CASE NAME: names of the parties that are suing each other, name of the court rendering the opinion, the year in which the decision was rendered; 2. FACTS: circumstances which occurred between the parties; 3. ISSUE: the legal question to be answered by the court; 4. DECISION: what was decided by the court. The basic structure has been labelled as IRAC, as seen earlier in this paper, from the initials of its main sections, which correspond to the following: 1. ISSUE: accounts for the legal problem presented by the facts of the case; 2. RULE: represents the applicable law to the particular case; 3. APPLICATION: regards the court analysis and rationale; 4. CONCLUSION: expresses the outcome of the case. The IRAC method is a widely recognized approach to legal analysis in many contexts, both academic and professional. Since there are many

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variations to this method, L2 students can be invited to discover the occurrences and frequencies of the various moves in the Kcorpus. The following is the layout of a case brief where the various moves are set out over several paragraphs, so that their identification and classification is made easier and more straightforward. [K04] Agricultural Insurance Co v Constantine Case Brief Parties: Plaintiff: Agricultural Insurance Co. Defendant: Constantine Facts: On May 7, 1942, at about 11:45 a.m., Mrs. Joseph Bova, Jr., parked her car at defendant’s parking lot, under the custody of defendant and received a ticket, which exempts defendant’s liability for loss or damage of cars, while Mrs. Bova denied she read the same or ever agreed to the terms printed on the ticket. At about 3 p.m. Mrs. Bova’s demanding the return of car was refused and on May 10, the car was delivered to the owner in a damaged condition. Plaintiff compensated Mrs. Bova $154.69 under the contract of insurance and sued defendant. Issue: Was the printed matter on the ticket a part of the contract of bailment? Reasoning: The court states that lacking the assent of bailor to the conditions printed on the ticket before delivering her car to the bailee, it cannot be a part of the contract of bailment. And bailor only considered the ticket as a token or receipt ostensibly for later identification of the bailed property, which cannot constitute a part of the contract. Holding: Judgment is for plaintiff.

Scanning several examples of case briefs in the corpus can help students to highlight recurring patterns, which can thus show regularities in the distribution of information and also in the use of certain rhetorical structuring. Flowerdew (2005: 325) underlines that many “corpus linguists have designed tagging systems for coding the generic ‘move structures’ of the ESP texts under investigation.” Luckily, case briefs in the Kcorpus already include tags indicating the move structure, as shown in Table 3. Therefore, identification of the various parts in the case briefs is quite straightforward and can be done manually or even through Wordsmith Tools, by calculating the frequency of a certain label in the corpus. The computed analysis needs to be followed by and integrated with an

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intensive reading of the texts, since the move tags are often abbreviated or bear a slightly different denomination from case brief to case brief. For example Facts can also be called Relevant Facts; Procedure can also be denominated Procedural History or even Procedural Setting; Application can sometimes acquire different names such as Court Rationale or Reasoning. Some other moves may be present but they are not introduced by any tag at all, such as Date of the Case, Citation and Court. Students are both personally and actively engaged in both the computed investigation and the manual tagging and both procedures represent moments in the discovery process. Even if the concordance lines of the item “Reasoning” in Table 3 show the presence of just nine occurrences, a more detailed investigation of the case briefs will show that the same generic move is often introduced by tags such as Application or Court Rationale. N

Concordance

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

g for a hearing on the merits. Reasoning: Although the gener /patents it accepted from him. Reasoning: If parties manife itute a contract in this case? Reasoning: There was no forma t is needed for consideration. Reasoning: The covenants were formance can be an acceptance? Reasoning: The court reckons $95 for the work he had done? Reasoning: To the service tha e under the statute of frauds? Reasoning: The statute of Fra of a debt, is constitutional? Reasoning: The Thirteenth Ame t of the contract of bailment? Reasoning: The court states t

Table 3. Concordance lines of the move ‘Reasoning’ Table 4 shows how students can summarize the occurrences and frequencies of the various moves at the end of the investigation. As underlined by Flowerdew (2005: 326), move structures “should not be seen as a rigid set of labels for coding text but instead should accept variations of the prototypical move structure patterning of a genre.” Iedema (1993: 87) adds that “EAP programs, in order to deal adequately with the language requirements of a particular ‘discourse community’ (cf. Swales 1990), should be sensitive to the rhetorical conventions prevalent in such discourse.” Therefore, guiding the students through the linguistic analysis and deconstruction of a certain genre and its conventions is a first step in the process towards helping them to deal with a particular discourse and to become aware of its organizational structure, norms and conventions (Iedema 1993: 88). Moreover, it also makes students aware of

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the possible variations or slight deviations from the fixed pattern, which actually occur and must be taken into consideration. Moves in the case briefs Date of the Case Citation Court Avoidance of the K (Relevant) Facts (Legal) Issue(s) (Court's) Holding Procedure/Procedural History/Procedural Setting Law or Rule(s) Court Rationale/Reasoning/Application Plaintiff's Argument Defendant's Argument Outcome/Conclusion Plaintiff/Appellant Defendant/Appellee Dissent Concurrence

Frequency 39

% 78%

12

24%

34

68%

3

6%

49

98%

49

98%

45

90%

35

70%

32

64%

46

92%

24

48%

23

46%

4

8%

7

14%

7

14%

3

6%

1

2%

Table 4. Moves occurrences and frequencies in the Kcorpus As ascertained by Flowerdew (2005: 327), the identification of the several moves and the tagging would be impossible to carry out on largescale corpora. In fact, it requires intensive reading and close scrutiny of each text, and since this can be very time-consuming only small specialized corpora should be considered for pedagogical purposes within an ESP module. For a pedagogy of discovery to be efficient and productive, the objectives must be clear and confusion or lengthy and complex procedures should be avoided. An example of the variety that can characterize moves in case briefs is given by the use of the subordinating conjunction ‘whether’ to introduce an indirect question in the Issue(s) or Legal Issue(s) category, which is

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present in 98% of texts. The corpus analysis will reveal that thirty case briefs out of fifty in the corpus utilize ‘whether’ with some variations, as shown by the concordance lines in Table 5. N

Concordance

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

nd for $93,000. Legal Issue(s): Whether Df was entitled to r graph 5 of the contract. Issue: Whether the court can excuse Pl’s property. Legal Issue(s): Whether the tr ct erred in r e judgment. Bailey sued. Issue: Whether a statute of punishi Bain Fan Club. Legal Issue(s): Whether the store owners wer 5 U.S. dollars. Legal Issue(s): Whether the consideration wa Cox for the same model. Issue: Whether a valid contract ex ng the assault. Legal Issue(s): Whether a federal prisoner he 5 yr period. Legal Issue(s): Whether the Owners and Villa he damages of $1,387.80. Issue: Whether the plaintiff can re as $18500 more. Legal Issue(s): Whether there was a contract pl’s behavior. Legal Issue(s): Whether faithfully and conti he jury awarded him $95. Issue: Whether the plaintiff, party heir agreement. Legal Issue(s): Whether BK was entitled to h refused to pay. Legal Issue(s): Whether a contract had been up for the Pl. Legal Issue(s): Whether the Df’s actions can iled an action. Legal Issue(s): Whether there was a memorand and defendant appealed. Issue: Whether plaintiff’s performa inated in June. Legal Issue(s): Whether time was of the esse re Centex could cash it. Issue: Whether equitable remedy of r- Acceptance- F: (SEE BOOK) I: whether a property owner’s p of encumbrance. Legal Issue(s): Whether the Pls can unreason from eating solid food. Issue: Whether a specialized or spe eviously known. Legal Issue(s): Whether the verbal settlemen fused to fill the order. Issue: Whether the part performance nwide shortage. Legal Issue(s): Whether failure to include s terminated the meeting. Issue: Whether the parties had ente g specific performance. Issues: Whether a valid K to sell wa ent to rescind. Legal Issue(s): Whether Buyers of property u sed, Appellant appealed. Issue: Whether the unique, sentimen

Table 5. Concordance lines for ‘whether’ in the Kcorpus From a closer reading and qualitative analysis of the case briefs in the corpus, students can deduce that ‘whether’ can introduce different types of questions followed by different types of answers. Let us consider the following excerpt from [K12]:

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‘Whether’ introduces a yes/no question in the example just given as in the majority of cases, and the Court’s Holding is simply signalled by the answer yes or no. In other cases such as in [K21] below, the Legal Issue(s) category is introduced by ‘whether’, implying doubt or choice between two alternatives. The answer is of course provided by the immediately subsequent Court’s Holding. Legal Issue(s): Whether “faithfully and continuously” was a condition precedent or a promise for the payment of $20,000? Court’s Holding: Promise [K21]

Some other times the Legal Issues are made up of two indirect questions introduced by ‘whether’ and the Court’s Holding that follows provides answers for both questions as in [K23]: Legal issue(s): Whether BK was entitled to have the condition protecting its promise strictly enforced; Whether giving strict effect to the termination provision which would involve divesting the Family Dining of territorial exclusivity would amount to a forfeiture? Court’s Holding: No, Yes. [K23]

Some other case briefs employ direct yes/no questions in the Issue category, without having recourse to the conjunction ‘whether’, as in [K44]: Issue: 1. Can the plaintiffs recover for their professional services that they rendered to the deceased? 2. Was the trial court correct in instructing the jury that it can consider the finances of the deceased in order to determine the compensation of the plaintiffs? Holding: 1. Yes 2. No. [K44]

The close textual investigation of case briefs confirms what DudleyEvans and St. John (1998: 31) stated, i.e. “[a]nalysis of spoken and written texts, especially under the influence of Swales’ Genre Analysis (1990), has assumed an important position in ESP.” The authors themselves consider genre analysis an “extremely useful tool of analysis that is of relevance to EAP, Business English and the other smaller branches of ESP such as Legal English” (1998: 31). Similarly Robinson (1991: 27) stated that “[g]enre analysis is an exciting and fruitful development within ESP. It

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exemplifies the current importance of content, particularly the social and institutional aspects of that content.”

Conventional abbreviations A simple frequency list obtained through Wordsmith Tools will show the presence of several abbreviations and symbols which indicate that the case briefs’ authors in the online bank performed a rhetorical task organizing and shaping the knowledge to suit various purposes and conventions of the specific discourse (Sullivan et al. 2007: 108; Giordano 2012). As Candlin et al. (2002: 309-310) have highlighted: “in order to function effectively within their own legal discourse community, they need to understand and master not only its discourses but also the conventions and socio-legal practices that shape it.” Students in the ESP classroom can be engaged in the identification, decoding and interpretation of the several abbreviations, for example of function words and expressions of time, and they will find out that certain abbreviations of words can assume a different grammatical function in the sentence. An example can be the use of ‘amount’ used as a verb or as a noun as seen in the following excerpts: Court Rationale: […] The mistake did not amt to negligence preventing equitable relief (…) [K01] Relevant Facts: Pl. 1st invited bids to construct a music, educational and recreation bldgs. The bids were to be accompanied by a bid bond in the amt of 5% of the bid. [K01]

Similarly, the abbreviation “w/d” indicates both ‘withdraw’ as a verb and ‘withdrawal’ as a noun. Plaintiff’s Argument: Rescission is improper b/c by written agreement Df agreed not to w/d the bid for a period of 35 days after the bids were opened and the language forbid w/d based on negligence. [K01]

The suffix –ed for the past participle can even be added to the abbreviation K to mean ‘contracted’. Defendant’s Argument: Df and representative Ked under MM that the boundary was located other than where it was. [K08]

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Students can be also engaged in the search for the most frequent abbreviations and in their distinction between those standing for function words and those related to content words. As a matter of fact, a number of function words are often abbreviated in the case briefs. The following list shows those most frequently used: fr w/ w/i w/o b/c btwn

from with within without because between

Other abbreviations are used for expressions of time, as shown by the following list: hrs mos yrs morn

hours months years morning

Content words are of course specific terms belonging to the general legal field or to the specific context of contract law. The various names for the several types of court can be abbreviated: Ct-cts Ct of App- Ct of Appeals-App Ct C. Law Circuit Ct D. Ct. S. Ct - Sup. Ct Tr Ct

Court-Courts Court of Appeal Court of Law Circuit Court District Court Supreme Court Trial Court

Consider the following example: Procedure: Pl filed action for breach, trial ct found for pl and against df ($14000); App Ct affirmed. Affirmed with costs. [K29]

Words referring to quantities and measurements can also be abbreviated and may be easily identified by L2 students, such as yds standing for ‘yards’, ft meaning ‘feet’ and K meaning ‘thousand’ in the following example:

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Relevant Facts: Df Walker purchased 9.1 acres for $140K, then listed it w/ a realtor stating that […] and requested $245K. […] The subsequent listing stated “minimum 80K cubic yds of gravel,” 580 ft of Hwy frontage, and 2.6 acres had been zoned for commercial use. The price was increased to $470K […] [K45]

Specific legal terms can be also abbreviated and several acronyms and initialisms can be used for content words which are often repeated in the case briefs. Some of the recurrent contract terminology is abbreviated as follows: K MM PER PO prom/estp TPB TRO UCC S/F judicial hx

contract mutual mistake Parole Evidence Rule Purchase Order Promissory Estoppel Third Party Beneficiary Temporary Restraining Order Uniform Commercial Code Statute of Frauds judicial history

Consider the following examples: Court Rationale: […] “PER may be admitted to show by reason of MM the parties’ intent was not expressed in K. PER can be used to show true intent. [K08] Law or Rule(s): TPB have enforceable rights under Ks made for their benefit. The person who procures the promise (Pee) has no legal right to release or discharge the person who made the promise (Pr), from his liability to the beneficiary b/c the rights of the TPB vest immediately upon execution of the K. [K17]

The names of the several participants in the trial can also be abbreviated, as in D-Df for Defendant and P-Pl for Plaintiff. Additionally, participants can take on a different role according to the type of contract entered into. Therefore, as seen in the excerpt from [K17] above, Pee can stand for promisee and Pr can be used to abbreviate promisor in a promise agreement. The instances shown above are just some examples of how frequent abbreviations and acronyms are in case briefs and this therefore justifies the need to make students aware of their presence and utilization in this particular genre. Iedema points out that consciousness-raising of highly

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specific discourse conventions “is of course inseparable from the content these conventions apply to.” In this way, students “are given the opportunity to ‘look behind the scenes’ of the discourse in which they are expected to become experts – not in an ‘English language’ environment that ignores discipline specific conventions and content, but within the context of their own discipline” (1993: 110).

Corpus analysis and lexical variety As is widely known, corpus analysis very often provides unexpected outcomes, i.e. results and answers which were not actually looked for. Confirming and contrasting hypotheses is part of the students’ research process. So, for example, the qualitative analysis of case briefs can reveal the presence of certain lexical patterns that are not so common in the frequency list. Students will discover that, according to the type of contract mentioned in the case brief, the contracting parties acquire different names: if the case brief deals with an obligation the contracting parties will be obligee and obligor; in the case of a purchase agreement, vendee and vendor can be found, along with buyer and seller; a franchise agreement will be signed between a franchisee and a franchisor and a contract of bailment between a bailee and a bailor, as shown in Table 6. Contracting parties in different types of contracts or agreements bid bidder obligation obligee obligor purchase agreement vendee/buyer/customer/purchaser vendor/seller contract of bailment bailee bailor offer offeror offered/offeree option contract optionor promise promissee promisor franchise agreement franchisee franchisor lease/sublease agreement lessor lessee

Table 6. Contracting parties in different types of contracts or agreements

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According to Candlin et al. (2002: 306) it is very important “not to violate the integrity of the written legal genre being taught by, for example, misrepresenting or oversimplifying it.” So the magic words should be elaborate and expand not reduce or oversimplify if the aim is to allow students to become aware of the variety of terms utilized in the texts. The combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis can thus provide vocabulary expansion, both through lexical cohesion devices such as repetition, reiteration and synonyms, given by the relative frequency of certain items, and through lexical variety resulting in a more articulated knowledge of the specific terminology in contract case briefs. A quantitative and statistical analysis can reveal the occurrence of repeated utterances or chunks that provide a source of opportunities to observe and analyse. Keywords and key-phrases can then be sorted into categories, making the resulting information relevant to the specific ESP learning context. Thurstun and Candlin (1998: 269) underline that “by drawing students’ attention to collocates of the key word, concordancebased study has considerable potential for expanding student vocabulary while dealing in detail with selected items.” Long lists of corpus findings are not necessarily useful for ESP students, and large corpora or long texts can often discourage them. As underlined earlier, in order to counterbalance the complexity of the passages, it is advisable to work on smaller corpora. Some tasks may only require recognition of superficial regularities, therefore students can be engaged in a search for collocational patterns. Concordance lines usually display a list of occurrences of a word or phrase in a given corpus including its surrounding co-text. As Gavioli (1997: 90) explains, engaging the students in the analysis of a concordance list implies a three-stage reading process: (a) the concordance as a list; (b) a closer reading of particular lines from the list; and (c) a reading of some texts containing the examples. The results of the concordance analysis will reveal some of the most frequent uses of the word contract and its various collocates in the specialized professional legal community, such as bilateral contract, enforceable contract, oral contract, or void contract, and avoidance of the contract, enforcement of the contract or termination of the contract as summarized in Table 7. Concordance-based materials certainly offer students a rich experience of language and specific discourse. Students are presented with the “opportunity to condense and intensify the process of learning through exposure to multiple examples of the same vocabulary item in context, and to promote awareness of collocational relationships” (Thurstun / Candlin 1998: 270). In other words, corpus analyses allow and encourage students “to become sensitive to the patterns of language frequently surrounding

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the key word” (ibid.: 273) and keywords can surely become the link between genre-based and corpus-based analyses as proposed by Mike Scott in the XIX Seminário Nacional de Inglês Instrumental, in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in 2005. ‘Contract’ and its collocations bilateral binding collateral enforceable implied contract oral parole unformalized valid verbal void acceptance acknowledgement avoidance consideration duration of the contract enforcement execution formation performance rescission termination

Table 7. The keyword ‘contract’ and its collocations in the case briefs The outcomes of corpus analysis do not merely mark a point of arrival in determining the distribution of specific lexical and grammatical features within and across texts but they can be further utilized by instructors and ESP practitioners for the creation of matching, gap-filling and problemsolving tasks to consolidate the understanding, acquisition and use of new lexical items.

Conclusions The present study has aimed to show how American online student case briefs can be employed in English for Legal Purposes classes at university and in language centre environments. Case briefs can be used as

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authentic materials through which L2 students can acquire the necessary specific language skills and have the opportunity to compare different legal systems and practices. Exploring the various branches of law can help students gain an understanding of legal cases as well as master the appropriate generic behaviours and discursive and rhetorical conventions of the legal community. Technology certainly facilitates the archiving and analysis of data, but it can also help ESP practitioners and instructors in the relatively easy creation of tailor-made materials and tasks. In an ESP classroom, instructors should bear in mind that the goal of tasks is not just to serve as vehicles for developing linguistic and communicative competences but they should also aim to equip students with problem-solving skills, such as the ability to edit, classify and interpret data and even formulate and verify hypotheses. In this way, students can be involved in a discovery process and their learning can be both inductive and deductive. Both genre analysis and corpus analysis can be utilized in any linguistic investigation and the creation of tasks so that the integration of top-down and bottom– up exploration of texts can help raise students’ rhetorical and lexicogrammatical consciousness and increase their awareness of how texts accomplish what they aim to do. The use of both genre-based and corpus-based approaches allows students to explore text and context even in small specialized corpora and, as Gavioli (1997: 97) underlines, “in so doing to build their own mental constructs about how language works.” In this way, students are exposed to real language and its use in its own community, and this facilitates the acquisition of a metacognitive awareness that learners can carry with them into their target professional community.

References Belcher D. 2009. What ESP is and can be: an introduction. In D. Belcher (ed.), English for Specific Purposes in Theory and Practice. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press: 1-20. Berkenkotter C. / T.N. Huckin 1995. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition, Culture, Power. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bhatia V.K. 1993. Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman. Candlin C.N. / V.K. Bhatia / C.H. Jensen 2002. Developing legal writing materials for English second language learners: problems and perspectives. English for Specific Purposes 21: 299–320.

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Dudley-Evans T. / M.J. St. John 1998. Developments in English for Specific Purposes: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flowerdew L. 2005. An integration of corpus-based and genre-based approaches to text analysis in EAP/ESP: countering criticisms against corpus-based methodologies. English for Specific Purposes 24: 321332. Garner B.A. / J. Newman / T. Jackson 2002. The Redbook. A Manual on Legal Style. St. Paul, MN: Thomson/West Group. Gavioli L. 1997. Exploring texts through the oncordancer: guiding the learner. In A. Wichmann / S. Flicgelstone / T. McEnery / G. Knowles (eds), Teaching and Language Corpora, Applied Linguistics and Language Study. London and New York: Longman. Giordano M. 2012. K case briefs in American Law Schools: a genre-based analysis. In C. Berkenkotter / V.K. Bhatia / M. Gotti (eds), Insights into Academic Genres, Linguistic Insights, Studies in Language and Communication. Bern: Peter Lang: 377-396. Hyland K. 2000. Disciplinary Discourses. Social Interactions in Academic Writing. London: Longman. Iedema R.A.M. 1993. Legal English: subject specific literacy and genre theory. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 16/2: 86-122. Pinna A. 2006. Corpus technique and discovery learning in the ELT classroom. In H. Bowles / J. Douthwaite / D.F. Virdis (eds), Ricerca e Didattica nei Centri Linguistici di Ateneo, Atti delle Giornate di Studi sull’Insegnamento delle Lingue. Cagliari: CUEC: 57-75. Robinson P.C. 1991. ESP Today: A Practitioner’s Guide. English Language Teaching. London: Prentice Hall International. Schelin S. Undated. How to write case briefs: tips for the law student. At http://www.howtodothings.com/careers/a2850-how-to-write-a-brieffor-law-school.html. Sullivan W.M. / A. Colby / J.W. Wegner / B. Lloyd / L.S. Shulman 2007. Educating Lawyers. Preparation for the Profession of Law. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Swales J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thurstun J. / C.N. Candlin 1998. Concordancing and the teaching of vocabulary of academic English. English for Specific Purposes 17/3: 267-280.

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Websites www.4lawschool.com www.csus.edu/indiv/c/carperdl/Briefing Cases.htm http://www.howtodothings.com/careers/a2850-how-to-write-a-brief-forlaw-school.html

CHAPTER NINE TEACHER, LEARNERS AND CORPUS LINGUISTICS: CROSS-ANALYSING MODALITY IN THE LANGUAGE OF EDITORIALS AND DEVELOPING WRITING SKILLS LUISELLA LEONZINI UNIVERSITY OF TRIESTE, ITALY

Introduction This paper describes the application of a corpus-based approach to teaching English for Specific and Academic Purposes. I discuss the pedagogical implications that corpus investigation may have for language learning and language teaching processes. The specific focus of this paper is on modality which, both in epistemic and deontic verbal expression, is identified and analysed in a corpus of 67 editorial articles from The Economist. In order to develop learners’ persuasion-based writing skills, the unequivocally momentous role that modality plays in newspaper editorials is highlighted; particular attention is paid to the modal expressions used by journalists to communicate their personal concerns over and dis/agreement with specific issues, and to influence the reader’s opinion. Although corpus-based language study has a solid historical background and, over the last twenty years, research projects have proliferated, thus proving the validity of corpus methodology, corpus data analysis in the classroom seems to be a fairly recent innovation. As Bernardini (2004: 15) claims, “corpora seem to have entered the classroom by the back door.” The sort of investigations which learners are faced with, when asked to surf the thousands of words that form a corpus, be it a

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specialised or general language corpus, have recently become a viable tool in language learning environments. A look back to early insights into both the theoretical and practical pedagogical implications which have shaped language learning processes, in the form of both corpus-driven and corpusbased analyses, is mandatory. In his studies on how to develop language skills, Johns (1991) coins the term data-driven learning (DDL) and describes how, by examining the concordances of specific language features, learners can test and infer generalisations from attentive observation of their use. The DDL technique provides learners with instruments to discover facts about language, identify language patterns and benefit from remarks which might account for the whole data set. In his approach to language discovery, Johns outlines two possible procedures, respectively inductive1 and deductive.2 In both cases, he suggests that learners should be monitored and guided by their teacher. Both approaches to language study and discovery redefine the roles of teacher and learner; the former becomes a coordinator and facilitator, while the latter is trained to develop decision-making skills. Johns’ main concern focuses on using corpus linguistics to develop learning skills in a less institutional learning context, thus boosting intrinsic motivation and promoting proficient language learning. Johns’ pioneering studies provided further opportunities to implement this technique in the classroom. Over the last twenty years, a huge number of scholars (e.g. Aston 1995, 1996, 1997; Aston / Gavioli 2001; Barlow 1996; Bernardini 2000, 2002, 2004; Gavioli 1997; Leech 1997; Sinclair 1991, 1996; Stubbs 1996, 2001) have discussed the importance of students’ learning about language with corpora. The reasons for this are various, and among them I focus on certain issues which are relevant to the present study. Firstly, wearing her/his newly shaped hat as a facilitator, the teacher is asked to use corpus analysis to provide learners with authentic tools of interaction; after prior attentive observation, this approach promptly triggers the acquisition and reproduction of socially-established forms of language. Corpus analysis can track schemata which are selected, memorised and then reproduced, thus offering opportunities for using naturally occurring language in context. In a schema-based process, concordances highlight

 1

This process enables learners to infer generalisations from observed data and to make their own personal contribution to language analysis on the basis of their intuition and linguistic competence. 2 Johns classifies the second procedure as deductive, because it is based on previously-acquired information and generalisations which provide learners with the necessary tools to classify concordances, test the rules they have already studied and consolidate their knowledge.

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patterns of repetition and variation within a collection of texts (Aston 1995) and stress how schemata may vary from larger and more specific to smaller and more general ones. Secondly, corpus linguistics helps learners to focus on their own perspective as regards language use. As argued by Sinclair (1996), the exploration of corpus data can develop the analyst’s sensitivity towards contextual factors and observation of the tendency of a word to occur in company with either a particular lexical item (collocation) or grammatical word (colligation), or even with one or more items from a specific semantic field or in a particular text type. That said, language use is documented and learners’ communicative competence is enhanced. Thirdly, in her study, Bernardini (2001) suggests that students should be curious and appreciate serendipitous findings; from this perspective, learners become explorers and consider unexpected discoveries as steps driving them on to make further discoveries. A fourth and further key point of how students may benefit from learning with corpora lies in the process of developing reading skills. Gavioli (1997, 2001) provides evidence of how exploring concordances of word frequency can enhance learners’ prediction skills for text structure and content prior to reading through the text/s under analysis. By examining the concordance lines of a corpus, learners experience how to identify the genre of text/s from which they derive; frequency lists reveal pivotal words (both lexical and grammatical) in a corpus, concordance techniques trigger the interaction of bottom-up and top-down technical approaches and improve the understanding of a specific text. Finally, as Leech (1997) points out, the greatest potential of corpus investigation is that it prompts autonomous learning. The availability of self-access facilities which can be used both inside and outside the classroom may mean avoiding direct authoritarian teacher control. The paper is divided as follows. Section 1 explains what a corpus is and then how corpus investigation is developed in the project. In Section 2, I outline the rationale for using corpus linguistics in the classroom as a useful tool to develop learners’ writing skills. I will show how data analysis can boost learners’ curiosity and motivation to engage in active participatory learning. The section ends with an overview of Palmer’s framework, which is adopted to analyse epistemic and deontic modal occurrences in a corpus and whose ultimate aim contributes to fostering learners’ effective expression of their (un)favourable viewpoint on various concerns. Section 3 presents the context and describes the project in all its components. The section illustrates how responsibilities are distributed and shared among the participants while exploring data. Quantitative data

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are provided and qualitative analysis is presented and discussed. Finally, Section 4 contains some concluding remarks.

The Corpus Corpus description The data on which this study is based, and which were initially collected for personal academic research, were adopted as a didactic tool in the classroom to improve learners’ reading and writing skills. This study analyses corpus exploration for the pedagogical implications it may have for the language learning environment. The corpus consists of 67 editorial articles3 (68,075 words), from the Leaders4 and Europe sections and Charlemagne5 opinion column, which discuss the question of the euro as the single currency adopted by Eurozone member states. The study period covers articles published from 1 January 19996 to 21 July 2012.7

Rationale for the corpus choice and initial steps towards corpus analysis The main criteria for data selection were twofold. My first concern was to choose a quality European newspaper strongly focused on world economic, financial and political issues with high circulation figures in

 3

The articles were retrieved from the magazine’s website but also collected as hard copy. 4 The Leaders section is the introductory section of The Economist. It consists of five articles, whose topics are usually chosen via a dynamic collaboration between journalists and the editor, who choose the most relevant news of the week to write about. These articles, which emerge from group negotiation, include comments on the subjects dealt with, through which the journalists express their opinions, thus providing highly connotative messages. 5 The Charlemagne opinion column is included at the end of the Europe section. It takes its name from the founder of the Holy Roman Empire and writes about economics, politics and finance in Europe. Each weekly article in this section reveals the journalist’s position on the topic discussed. 6 1 January 1999 corresponds to the official inception of the euro as the single currency within the Eurozone. 7 2012 was a crucially negative year for the euro, which underwent a severe economic crisis. Although threatening events and questionable economic and political choices made by Eurozone members as well as outsiders gave little space and hope for future recovery, I decided to stop collecting data with the second issue of July 2012.

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Europe and worldwide. Economic affairs are usually top-ranked, of common and topical interest to targeted readers and experts in the field (e.g. economists, politicians, economics scholars), non-expert albeit curious readers (potentially all European citizens as well as Englishspeaking readers around the world) and undergraduate students on degree courses which include a major in journalism. Secondly, I planned to examine how verbal modality, in both its epistemic and deontic verbal expressions, was used by journalists to discuss the euro and express their personal views using persuasive constructs. The third focus of the research project, which emerged while investigating the use and functions of modality in the corpus, focused on the learner. From a learner-centred perspective, I aimed to involve a group of undergraduate students enrolled in their second year at the Department of Humanities (University of Trieste) and doing a degree course in Communication Sciences. In its first phase the project centred on a student corpus investigation; they were asked to familiarise themselves with quantitative analysis. After reading through a word list, learners were invited to analyse top-ranked and frequent lexemes and comment on the frequency of grammar and lexical words. Learners then created two new word lists, one of top-ranked grammar words and a second with top-ranked lexical words. These initial steps of data analysis were considered useful in order to achieve a certain degree of familiarity with ranking and frequency procedures. They were then requested to examine the figures concerning modal rankings and frequency measures. Having concluded this introductory phase, the learners were then guided towards conducting an in-depth investigation and they turned their attention to the qualitative analysis of modal occurrences within the corpus. Before asking learners to proceed with their (quantitative and qualitative) analyses, I had previously processed the same research and drawn my conclusions on the data results, which allowed me to monitor the students’ exploratory moves. In the qualitative phase of the project, students worked in groups and were asked to choose and inspect concordance searches and the most frequent collocates of could, must and should. Class activities on could in its epistemic speculative and deontic permissive functions, must and should as an epistemic deductive and deontic permissive modal expressions were carried out, monitored and checked. Finally, the results were shared and commented on in the classroom under the supervision of the teacher.

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Rationale and methodological approach For the purposes of the present study, I have chosen to explore the use and functions of epistemic and deontic modal verbal expressions as components of a subjective and persuasive approach to the news pertaining to the language of journalism. Of all the linguistic tools (adjectives, nouns, adverbs and verbs) that journalists might choose to construct and develop editorial articles, modal auxiliaries are straightforward and strategically powerful forms of communication, as they reflect the writer’s personal opinion and attitude on specific issues and have a strong impact on the reader. Verbalisation per se leaves little room for misunderstanding in terms of conveying the message and what is conveyed; unquestionably, modal verbalisation is a direct instrument for drawing the reader’s attention to key words and key points relating to the reported content. The present investigation draws on some descriptive principles and notions of the corpus linguistics approach (see Biber et al. 1998; Sinclair 1991; Stubbs 1996, 2001b; McEnery / Wilson 2001; McEnery / Hardie 2012) and is accompanied by quantitative and qualitative analyses of modal auxiliaries as developed by Palmer (1979, 1986, 1990, 2001, 2003), Coates (1983, 2003) and Leech (2003). In order to conduct reliable quantitative analyses and make relevant reflections on the linguistic features of corpus data, the AntConc 3.3.58 (Anthony 2012) freeware concordance program is used. A qualitative investigation is also conducted and the results of concordance searches and collocates are examined.

The language of journalism: a specialised corpus The reasons for choosing to explore a specialised corpus, with data collected from the weekly British magazine The Economist are twofold. Firstly, the syllabus of the degree course in Communication Sciences includes courses on the history of journalism, the language of journalism and new media, and the sociology of communication, all of which are delivered in Italian and deal mainly with journalism in Italy. I thought that exploring the language of a magazine with an international editorial

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AntConc was designed by Laurence Anthony and first released in 2002 as a simple KWIC concordance program, but then developed as a useful text analysis tool. Other versions followed the initial one, the last being released in 2012 for Windows, Mac and Linux. AntConc provides the following tools for analysis: concordance, concordance plot, file view, clusters, N-grams, collocates, word lists and keywords.

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perspective such as The Economist which provides authoritative insights and opinions on international news (e.g. world politics, business, finance, science and technology) would be of great help to the students to develop skills and techniques to create valid and effective communication as possible future journalists. On the one hand, the paper has espoused and respectfully upholds the principles of its founder, James Wilson, concerning free trade, internationalism and minimum interference from the government; on the other hand, its staff have always claimed journalistic integrity and declared that The Economist’s articles have a distinctively “independent, plain-speaking, concise tone with a reverence for facts” (see www.economist.com). That said, my second concern for data collection and analysis was born as a challenge and then guided by the hypothesis that no specific training or competence in the field of economics was asked of its readers. I relied on the magazine’s claim that the journalists use plain language and certain colloquialisms to make the articles “accessible to the reasonably educated and intelligent layperson” (see www.economist.com). Moreover, confident in my expertise as a regular and careful reader of the magazine, I estimated that undergraduate students with a solid B2 level in the receptive skill of reading comprehension could analyse this corpus and, most of all, widen their knowledge and competence both lexically and grammatically, thus enhancing their writing skills. Finally, I assessed that exploring modal verbs could be motivating for learners in terms of achieving an adequate degree of proficiency in preparation for their written exam. This study should guide them towards examining the different forms of modality used by journalists, subsequently enabling them to adopt either epistemic or deontic verbal forms to write an editorial article and comment on economics-based (and possibly not only economics-based) international news.

Epistemic and deontic modal auxiliaries: the framework of analysis The logician Georg Von Wright was the first to introduce the concepts of epistemic and deontic modality, and as he argued in his Essay in Modal Logic (1951: 1-2): We shall distinguish between truth-concepts or truth-categories and modal concepts or modal categories. […] The modal categories […] we shall distinguish between four kinds of modi. First, there are the alethic modes or modes of truth. These are the modalities with which so-called modal logic traditionally has been concerned. They can conventionally be divided onto two sub-categories. […] A proposition is pronounced necessarily,

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possibly, or contingently true. Secondly, there are the epistemic modes or modes of knowing. […] The basic epistemic modalities are: verified (known to be true), falsified (known to be false), and undecided (neither known to be true nor known to be false). Thirdly, there are the deontic modes or modes of obligation. […] The basic deontic modalities are: obligatory (“ought to”), permitted (“may”), and forbidden (“must not”).

Following Von Wright’s seminal suggestions, Palmer developed the investigation of modality and devoted most of his research (see 1979, 1986, 1987, 1990, 1995, 2001, 2003) to the analysis of how modal verbs are used in many languages. Taking as his core concern that the modal system indicates a form of negotiation where the producer (speaker/writer) chooses to highlight his/her judgemental stance on the world, Palmer distinguishes three main categories of modality, i.e. epistemic, deontic and dynamic. In this study, I adopt Palmer’s framework, which has gained widespread recognition among scholars and is seen as the backbone of modality research, thus fostering a plethora of further studies in the field (e.g. Coates 1983; Perkins 1983; Biber et al. 1999; Bybee / Fleischman 1995). In order to identify and examine modal occurrences in the corpus, I adopt Palmer’s terminology. Since the examination of all modal occurrences in the data would exceed the space allotted to the present paper, I accordingly decided to limit the investigation to forms pertaining to the epistemic and deontic categories. I opted to examine the frequency measures, concordances and collocates of could, should and must as representative forms of verbal epistemic and deontic modality in the data. They are used as explanatory samples to provide evidence of how data analysis was seen and then undertaken by the learners. Palmer’s approach to modal auxiliaries (2003) is summarised in Table 1 below. Table 1. Epistemic and deontic modality EPISTEMIC MODALITY (concerned with the speaker’s SPECULATIVE attitude about the factual status of the proposition)

MAY MIGHT COULD

Possibility The possibility that a judgement is true

Ex: (it is 9 a.m. on Sunday morning) She is not at home: she may be out for a walk. Try again in 30 minutes if you do not find her.

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DEDUCTIVE

ASSUMPTIVE

DEONTIC MODALITY (The event is controlled by circumstances external to the subject of the sentence)

OBLIGATIVE

MUST SHOULD CANNOT

WILL

MUST SHOULD OUGHT TO HAVE TO

PERMISSIVE

MAY CAN COULD

COMMISSIVE

SHALL

Necessity The only possibility, deduction from facts known to the speaker A reasonable conclusion which focuses on somebody’s assumption(s)

The external necessity coming from an outer authority

An external given permission

Promises, threats A personal commitment to perform an action

Ex: (the lights are on) She must be at home.

Ex: (It is Sunday morning) She will be at home now (she is always at home at this time). Ex: You must fill in the application form before requesting an interview (the human resources manager says to a possible applicant). Ex: You may come in now (says the doctor to the patient waiting outside the door of her/his consulting room). Ex: You shall have the book you asked for tomorrow.

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As displayed in the above table, epistemic modality expresses the producer’s opinion and highlights his/her degree of knowledge about what is being discussed. Conversely, deontic verbal expressions “indicate permission and obligation emanating from the speaker” (Palmer 2001: 75). A detailed description as well as examples clarifying how modal forms are used in the corpus will be provided in the following section.

The Project The context In the academic year 2012-2013, I ran a project aimed at developing writing skills which involved a group of undergraduate students enrolled in their second year at the Department of Humanities (University of Trieste) doing a degree course in Communication Sciences. Table 2 below shows information about the course involved in the project. Table 2. Course presentation YEAR OF STUDY ORGANISATION OF THE COURSE: ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS 2 CREDITS CORPUS ANALYSIS STUDENTS

LANGUAGE COMPETENCE

GOALS

2nd YEAR MODULE I: 30 HOURS, 1st SEMESTER MODULE II: 30 HOURS, 2nd SEMESTER

12 (6 MODULE I, 6 MODULE II) MODULE II: 30 HOURS 50 (ITALIAN, SLOVENE, CROATIAN NATIVE SPEAKERS, SOME ERASMUS STUDENTS FROM SPAIN, FRANCE, NORWAY AND POLAND) PRODUCTIVE SKILLS (WRITING, SPEAKING) SOLID B1, APPROACHING B2 LEVEL RECEPTIVE SKILLS (READING, LISTENING) SOLID B2 LEVEL, APPROACHING C1 PRODUCTIVE SKILL IN WRITING: ACHIEVING A SOLID B2 LEVEL RECEPTIVE SKILL IN READING: ACHIEVING A SOLID C1 LEVEL

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As Table 2 above shows, the English course runs all year. During the first semester, Module I focuses on developing the receptive skill of reading and the productive skill of writing short essays. Students are asked to tackle texts of different genres (quality and popular newspaper articles, academic papers, textbooks, abstracts, transcripts of political speeches and conference presentations) on a wide range of topics (economics, finance, fashion, technology, sport etc.). Pre-reading activities are planned (predicting, guessing, inferencing, brainstorming etc.) and both extensive and intensive activities are planned, and pre-reading exercises, top-down and bottom-up activities are presented, carried out and monitored in the classroom (Leonzini 2009). Students’ reflections and self-assessment are encouraged, and strategic techniques to boost both extensive and intensive reading skills are provided.9 As regards written production, students are guided to plan short essays on different topics. Specific attention is paid to planning the composition, in terms of selecting key issues to develop and of dedicating enough space to each paragraph. Coherence, accuracy, use of language and originality are taken as descriptors to assess their linguistic competence.10 During the second semester, Module II focuses on corpus data analysis and aims at developing learners’ written skills. By examining how modal verbs are used by journalists to influence and persuade their readers on the issues they discuss and comment on, learners are guided to implement their written linguistic (lexical and grammatical) competence in the specialised language of journalism. Modal verbs are revised as a grammar-focus class activity, students are asked to do gap filling, matching and cloze exercises to assess their competence. It is unusual for learners to be confident in epistemic and deontic modality: they usually learn modality as expressing ability, necessity and obligation, so examples from the corpus showing what epistemic and deontic modality expresses are given. After an introductory phase of classwork activity in which learners’ prerequisites are tested and shared, the teacher presents the new topic; students are provided with new content and data to work on and investigate. In class, they are asked to work in pairs or small groups and develop corpus analysis techniques. The practice phase of the project develops in some pair or group work sessions done in class during which students are expected to search for epistemic and deontic modals in the corpus. Directions on how to analyse data are given by the teacher who shows and explains the importance of starting their

 9

Among these techniques we worked on timing, also focusing on keywords, underlining topic sentences and unknown words, and understanding morphological structure and word classes. 10 Each of these descriptors is ascribed points in the range 0 to 5.

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inspection with a word list and to examine project keyword (modals) rankings and frequency measures. Then concordance searches and the collocates of some modals are shown and discussed as explicatory measures to enable learners to perform their analyses. A subsequent class discussion is set up to elicit concluding remarks on modal occurrences and recurrences in the corpus. Statistical data are provided by the teacher after learners’ presentations of both their quantitative and qualitative investigations. Besides its primary goal of developing learners’ knowledge of and competence in modality, this project also has some important pedagogical implications which must be given some time and space for reflection. In a sharing and collaborative climate like this, both the teacher’s and learners’ roles are redefined to prompt and develop both pair and group work and individual language learning.

Participants: the teacher and learners’ roles Corpus analysis in the classroom involves both the teacher’s and learners’ participation, which makes for a tailor-made teaching and learning process. Teacher-fronted class management and teacher talk time are reduced. Learners, on the contrary, are given more time to perform and more space to promote their thinking skills, improve their language proficiency and raise their self-confidence and self-esteem in order to become independent learners.

The teacher’s role and responsibilities The teacher becomes a precious resource and a key figure with whom to cooperate and thus develop team-working skills. As a collaborator, the teacher shares objectives with the learners in order to reach a common goal. As a coordinator, s/he monitors and evaluates process-oriented steps and tasks. As a diplomat, s/he is a sensitive prompter, able to make individual knowledge and linguistic competence the background for a reassuring and proficient joint partnership. As an organizer, s/he reduces teacher-fronted lessons and teacher talk time, conscious that studentcentred class management triggers a favourable educational setting and prompts proficient learning. As a planner, s/he provides learners with new topics in ways that attract their attention and motivate their quest for learning. Even if teacher-fronted lessons are significantly reduced, their positive aspects should not be ignored. If and when teacher talk time predominates, learners are given the opportunity to receive precious information and useful hints about how to organise their own learning.

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Finally, the teacher must be ready to provide clarification in case of tricky issues and to make concluding remarks on the topic discussed, as learners need useful feedback (see Leonzini 2012).

Learners’ role and responsibilities Learners become pioneer builders of their learning process; they cooperate with the teacher in order to develop their organisational and linguistic skills. They become active participants and feel involved in every step of their learning process. As co-operators, they build selfesteem and self-reliance, and develop experimental skills and strategies.11 As negotiators, they become responsible, select and discuss the learning process to meet their organizational needs (see Leonzini 2012).

Quantitative and qualitative analyses In this section I propose a mixed approach based on both quantitative and qualitative methods for the analysis of verbalised modality. I explore how modal verbs are used in the corpus in order to gain insights into the language of editorial articles from The Economist. To this end, I start with a quantitative analysis; the normalised frequency (hereafter nf)12 of modal occurrences is compared to all verbal occurrences within the corpus. Afterwards, the raw frequency and nf of each modal form are provided with a focus on their epistemic and deontic manifestations. A qualitative analysis of concordance searches and collocations of could, must and should, as representatives of either epistemic or deontic expressions, follows and concludes the section. All data results provided derive from a cross-analysis made separately by the teacher and the learners, which is finally shared and cross-checked in the classroom.

Quantitative analysis Verbalisation and modals Extensive reading and a close inspection of verbal occurrences in a word list from the corpus produced the results shown in Table 3 below. In

 11

The main strategies we focus on are planning, monitoring, deducing, problemsolving, contextualising, summarising, evaluating, and manipulating. 12 I set the base of normalisation to 1,000 words. This measure indicates the frequency of each modal per 1,000 words.

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a corpus of 68,075 tokens, verbalisation counts 10,279 manifestations and 1,638 modal occurrences. The findings suggest that “realis” occurs about six times less than “irrealis” (see Palmer 2001),13 with an nf value of 24.06 per 1,000 words. Table 3. Verbalisation in the corpus Corpus: 68,075 tokens Total verbs Modals Other

Occurrences Normalised frequency 11,917 1,638 10,279

175.05 24.06 150.99

Looking at these figures, although no generalisation can be hinted at as to how The Economist shapes opinion in its editorial articles, due to the specialised and limited corpus under investigation, it can be argued that the editorial articles published from 1999 to 2012 resort to nominalisation (i.e. nouns, adjectives, adverbs) more than modal verbalisation when the journalists intend to give a favourable / unfavourable evaluation of the euro issue. Due to space and time restrictions, this paper does not analyse other expressions of modality apart from verbal ones. Frequency of Epistemic and Deontic Modals An analysis follows with an examination of the most frequently recurring modals within the corpus, and details accounting for their ranking, raw frequency and normalised frequency are displayed in Table 4 below. Although has is the top-ranked auxiliary in the corpus, its normalised frequency as a modal verb equals 0.10. Moreover, the deontic realisations of have in the obligative forms of have to and had to respectively measure nf 0.52 and nf 0.07). That said, the frequency of the verb have to in the present and in the past tense provides evidence of an unavoidably limited use of this modal in its deontic forms. Looking at the

 13

As Palmer argues (2001), the terms “realis” and “irrealis” are technical definitions which have taken over from other expressions such as “modal” and “non-modal”, “non-declarative” and “declarative”, or “non-factual” and “factual”. A definition which highlights the difference between the two forms is given by Mithun (1999: 3) who claims that “The realis portrays situations as actualized, as having occurred or actually occurring, knowable through direct perception. The irrealis portrays situations as purely within the realm of thought, knowable only through imagination.”

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other verbal expressions and their frequencies, the journalists provide their readers with their own judgements and comments through both epistemic and deontic modal auxiliaries. Among the epistemic occurrences, at this stage of our examination we can only confirm the nf of the assumptive will whose value measures 5.34. As for other epistemic manifestations in their speculative and deductive forms, and deontic ones in their obligative and permissive expressions, a qualitative analysis is required, which may confirm whether they have a deontic or an epistemic value. Table 5 below ends the section devoted to quantitative analysis, and in light of the exploration conducted so far, it draws on which epistemic and deontic verbal constructs The Economist employs to gauge the economic and social instability of the euro currency. From this scenario, as well as an introductory extensive reading of all 67 editorial articles, we may infer that the magazine is far from maintaining a position of neutrality; no hints of hesitation seem to shape the discourse, which instead appears markedly subjective and prone to persuading the readers that it is time that the Eurozone and the EU took a decision and tried to recover from a worrying condition of sickness. Table 4. Modals ranking, frequency normalised frequency RANK 15 25 26 32 41 61 65 66 104 105 129

FREQUENCY 7 364 36 274 201 142 134 129 91 91 71

NF 0.10 5.34 0.52 4.02 2.95* (2.70) 2.08 1.96 1.89 1.33 1.33 1.04

142

5

0.07

211 44 0.64 238 38 0.55 438 20 0.29 1.144 7 0.10 * indicates the values of the verb used in its modal form

MODAL VERB has* will have * would may could should can might must need had* needs cannot needed ought

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Table 5. Epistemic and deontic modals used in the corpus EPISTEMIC MODALITY DEONTIC MODALITY

SPECULATIVE MAY MIGHT COULD DEDUCTIVE MUST SHOULD CANNOT ASSUMPTIVE WILL OBLIGATIVE MUST SHOULD OUGHT HAVE/ TO HAS/ PERMISSIVE COMMISSIVE

CAN

CANNOT No occurrences

HAD COULD

Qualitative analyses This subsection focuses on a qualitative investigation of epistemic and deontic occurrences. Table 6 below provides details of modal manifestations as they relate to corpus tokens, thus enabling the investigators to make sense of their use and value within the corpus. The given data result from an exploration of the concordance lines made per each “irrealis” item, in order to provide evidence of each measure and a valid explanation. A detailed examination of the concordance searches was carried out for all the modals; we explored expressions whose function could only be either deontic (i.e. ought to) or epistemic (i.e. might, will), but also focused on other auxiliaries which might be employed for their epistemic and deontic function (i.e. may, could, must, should and cannot14). Given that our research was concerned with the deontic and epistemic uses of could, must and should, we will only concentrate on an exploration of their values.

 14

As regards the modals can, cannot and could, we read through the concordance searches and marked whether the journalist adopted this form in its epistemic deductive or deontic permissive form; since the study is not concerned with analysing the dynamic function, we did not track its use within the corpus.

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Table 6. Frequencies of epistemic and deontic modals MODALITY

VERB

OCCURRENCES

EPISTEMIC SPECULATIVE

MAY15

184

CORPUS FREQUENCY (68,075 TOKENS) 2.70

MIGHT

91

1.33

COULD

139

2.04

MUST

1

0.01

EPSITEMIC DEDUCTIVE

EPISTEMIC ASSUMPTIVE DEONTIC OBLIGATIVE

DEONTIC PERMISSIVE

DEONTIC COMMISSIVE

SHOULD

9

0.13

CANNOT

36

0.52

WILL

364

5.34

MUST SHOULD OUGHT TO HAVE TO HAS TO HAD TO CAN

90 125 7

1.32 1.83 0.10

36 7 5 18

0.52 0.10 0.07 0.26

MAY

0

0

CANNOT COULD SHALL

12 0 NO OCCURRENCES

0.17 0

The measures concerning both the occurrence and nf of modals in their epistemic and deontic expression show that the top-occurring and most frequent ones are may and could in their epistemic speculative form which, respectively, occur 184 times (nf 2.70) and 139 times (nf 2.04). The deontic obligative auxiliaries must and should also have high figures. Must counts 90 occurrences, with a normalised frequency measuring 1.32, while should occurs 125 times within the corpus, with a normalised frequency of

 15

Among its 201 occurrences in the corpus, may occurs 184 times as an epistemic speculative auxiliary; as for the other occurrences, it refers to the fifth month of the year, i.e. “May”.

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1.83 occurrences per 1,000 words. Although these values do not seem to highlight the presence of either an epistemic speculative or a deontic obligative pattern within the corpus, they do at least show that The Economist develops its discourse on the rise and possible imminent fall of the euro currency basically around assumptions (will counts 364 occurrences with an nf of 5.34). Moreover, there seems to be no doubt that, when the moment to shape its point of view and subjective stance so urges, the magazine grounds its evaluative stance, expressing an epistemic judgement with the verbal forms of may and could, and finally moves quite comfortably in the direction of the compelling deontic obligative verbal expressions of must and should.

Analysis of could, must and should In this section I select the 15 most frequent collocates of could, must and should, along with a selected number of concordance searches, as explanatory examples to understand and shape possible schemata which learners may use to develop their writing skills. This procedure even focuses on implementing students’ reading skills and strategic techniques (from top-down to bottom-up reading) to identify pivotal words which the modals under investigation recur in company with, in order to consolidate their knowledge and competence with modality and promote autonomous learning. Concordance searches and collocates of could After using a four-word limit on either side of the modal could, we got 538 types which collocate with it, and a list of 1,287 tokens. None of the words occurs more frequently than could; as such, it has only downward collocates. We decided to limit our investigation to the 15 most frequent collocates of the node word, which are listed in Table 7 below in order of ranking. In the table, the is the most frequent collocate, with 75 occurrences, 41 on the left and 34 on the right, although be counts the highest statistical measure: 4.818 (MI16 score). This score shows the most



16 Mutual information scores give us evidence of how strong the collocation is, but they do not take into account the size of the corpus under investigation, which means that we cannot be certain of how reliable the association between the two words is. The procedure that underlies MI scores is summarised as follows: AntConc searches the corpus and looks at all the places where the node word and the collocate are found. Besides considering how frequent they are, it then calculates what the expected probability of these two words occurring close to each

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significant relationship between the two words in the list. That said, the words at the top of the table have the highest mutual information scores and the highest collocational strength with could, which thus indicates how strong or weak these collocates are. Upon closer inspection, it seems that, apart from the verb be, there are no other significant verbal collocates. Table 7. Most frequent collocates of could RANK FREQUENCY FREQUENCY (L) 308 32 0 336 8 7 350 6 5 361 5 5 376 6 4 392 32 29 404 5 3 416 13 4 426 4 3 432 6 2 438 7 2 448 7 3 458 16 11 490 75 41 498 10 9

FREQUENCY (R) 32 1 1 0 2 3 2 9 1 4 5 2 5 34 1

STAT WORD 4.818 4.582 4.479 4.384 4.290 4.065 3.913 3.810 3.765 3.718 3.657 3.537 3.357 2.988 2.809

be Greece ECB single economic that union by currency if EU Europe it the Euro

These findings were initially estimated as serendipitous discoveries by the learners, but then, considering that we had chosen a four-word limit span in our analysis, they tried to find a reasonable explanation for their hesitation. In the experience of the author, the semantic structure and construction of modals as auxiliary verbs17 is a tricky issue, and learners

 other would be. This is done on the assumption that the words in the corpus occur in a random order. Finally, this expected probability is compared to what actually occurs in the corpus, which is then converted into a score. Any score lower than three does not have a significant relationship. 17 I refer here to the common features that modals have, and which are often challenging for learners’ acquisition and use, such as: no modal verb has an infinitive; they do not have all modes and tenses; as auxiliary verbs, they do not need an auxiliary verb to be expressed in negative and interrogative forms; they are

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need a lot of practice to become confident and use them correctly. Among the numerous doubts, one of their strongest certainties was always that modal verbs support another verbal form and therefore cannot be used as independent verbal manifestations (except in short answers). A strong collocate of the node word with function items, such as that, by, if and the pronoun it, does not seem to be of importance in the context of our investigation; conjunctions, adverbs and pronouns are usually adopted to enhance, elaborate and extend information as tools of coherence and cohesion in the discourse. Conversely, the significant relationship with lexical words belonging to the economic field, and more precisely to the geopolitical and economic context under investigation (Greece, ECB, single, economic, currency, EU, Europe, euro), confirms the specificity of the corpus, whose lexically dense top-semantic chain “the euro” directs the readers’ attention towards the economic concerns of the Eurozone and the EU, which run the risk of an economic crash. To what extent the auxiliary could might contribute to persuading the addressees to sense the danger of the single currency’s possible fall is explained in the following citations: 1) But even if ultimate salvation is possible, Greece could fall into plenty of immediate traps. One is the mood at home, with almost daily mass protest outside parliament, interspersed with riots. (23rd November 2011) 2) The bill that could break up Europe. If eastern Europe goes down, it may take the European Union with it. […] Unilateral or accelerated adoption of the euro would make far less sense for a third group of bigger countries with floating exchange rates: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. None of these is ready for the tough discipline of a single currency that rules out any future devaluation. Their premature entry could fatally weaken the euro. (26th February 2009)

3) ECB is the only institution that can staunch market panic quickly. The ECB could still keep pressure on the likes of Italy, and prevent them from back-siding on reform, by making sure that its support was at a sufficiently punitive interest rate. (19th November 2011) 4) The ECB could and should cut rates and begin quantitative easing, but official funds for investment are limited. Most ambitious ways of boosting growth, such as the completion of a single European market for services, are sadly not even on the table. (26th May 2012)

 always followed, when in the affirmative form, by a bare infinitive, or by an adverb before the infinitive.

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Concordances searches and collocates of must Table 8. Most frequent collocates of must RANK FREQUENCY FREQUENCY (L) 185 6 0 202 7 4 236 19 1 256 9 0 265 19 14 273 8 3 278 8 7 284 5 4 298 16 12 303 11 9 325 24 7 331 7 3 338 16 11 346 34 18 355 10 5

FREQUENCY (R) 6 3 18 9 5 5 1 1 4 2 17 4 5 16 5

STAT WORD 5.502 5.275 4.718 4.359 4.257 4.104 4.019 3.926 3.717 3.599 3.069 2.923 2.713 2.499 2.269

do Italy be more it its Europe zone that euro to for of the and

Among the 366 types (819 tokens) which collocate with must, none occurs more frequently than must; as such, like could, it only has downward collocates. Looking at the 15 most frequent collocates with this modal, as displayed in Table 8 above, again the figures show that the definite article the is the most frequent collocate, counting 34 occurrences, 18 on the left and 16 on the right, although the verb do has the highest statistical measure: 5.502 (MI score). A major number of collocates can be found in function words (see Table 8 above), but they do not appear to have pivotal weight in our research, thus it would be better to concentrate our attention on verbal (do, be) and lexical collocates (Italy, Europe, zone, euro). If do highlights the obligatory urgency to instigate material processes to withstand the economic crisis, as citations 5 and 6 show, the verbal form be focuses on the peremptory order to carry out relational processes, as citations 7 and 8 point out: 5) If Germany’s Angela Merkel wants to save the euro, she must do more for Italy’s Mario Monti. (21st January 2012) 6) The only institution that can provide immediate relief is the ECB. As the leader of last resort, it must do more to save the banks by offering

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unlimited liquidity for longer duration against a broader range of collateral. (26th November 2011) 7) The new president of the European Central Bank must be bolder than his predecessor. (2nd October 2011) 8) In the short term, it must be enough to free the ECB to intervene without limit, by assuaging fears of moral hazard. (3rd December 2011)

The semantic field of “the euro” highlights its powerful presence in the corpus; and core lexemes, like Europe, euro and zone, recur as top collocates of deontic must, whose significant relationship may be shown in the following exemplifying citations: 9) Never has it been plainer that Europe must do more on its own, particularly in its own back yard. (17th July 1999) 10) The euro zone must draw on its joint resources by collectively standing behind its big banks and issuing Eurobonds to share of its debt. (26th May 2012)

Concordances searches and collocates of should Table 9. Most frequent collocates of should RANK FREQUENCY FREQUENCY (L) 150 9 8 238 43 2 318 5 5 352 5 3 358 9 7 362 12 5 374 7 6 389 19 14 390 10 7 396 22 19 424 7 4 425 5 4 434 12 10 435 26 17 461 55 34

FREQUENCY (R) 1 41 0 2 2 7 1 5 3 3 3 1 2 9 21

STAT WORD 6.377 5.338 4.555 4.110 4.003 3.929 3.853 3.699 3.670 3.218 3.268 3.266 3.166 3.141 2.635

whether be leaders growth they not zone it this that Europe EU euro and the

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Finally, none of the 493 types (1,202 tokens) that must collocates with occurs more frequently; as such, like could and must, should only has downward collocates. Among the 15 most frequent collocates with the modal verb, as Table 8 above illustrates, the definite article the is the most frequent collocate with 55 occurrences, 34 on the left and 21 on the right, although the conjunction whether counts the highest statistical measure: 6.377 (MI score). A cross-inspection of Tables 7, 8 and 9 highlights that should collocates more with function words (whether, they, not, it, this, that, and, the) than could and must. As stated above, function words do not hold an overriding position in our analysis; and as we did for the examination of other modals, we converge our final examination on verbal and lexical collocates. The verb be is a strong collocate of should, with a statistical significance of 5.338. As for lexical collocates, we find recurrent lexemes such as Europe, zone and euro, accompanied by two other strong collocates, leaders and growth, whose MI scores measure, respectively, 4.555 and 4.110. The following citations point to the imperative duty to adopt existential processes in order to prevent a collapse of the euro (citation 11), and they focus on the compelling and decisive role that leaders and growth should play in this scenario of economic fragility and weakness (citations 12 and 13). 11) The Merkozy’s duo have decreased that priority should be a march towards greater fiscal discipline, to be enforced by strong referees. Yet, such a priority is dangerously lopsided. (10th December 2011) 12) Yet, to adapt any such change now would be seen as so contemptuous of the voters’ wishes as to invite a still more explosive anti-elitist backlash. Rather than indulging in more backroom bargaining, Europe’s leaders should draw two broader lessons from the French and Dutch ones. (2nd June 2005) 13) Instead of austerity and pretence, a credible rescue should start with growth and, where it is unavoidable, a serious restructuring of debt. (9th September 2011)

Conclusion The present study has attempted to show how corpus investigation can help both teacher and learners to pinpoint the use of modal verbs in their epistemic and deontic expressions, which might be problematic for learners. The quantitative analysis of data using concordancing software has developed both learners’ extensive skills and strategic techniques to

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implement autonomous learning. A quantitative approach to electronic analysis has been integrated with a qualitative inspection of the different forms and functions of modality that the editorial articles within the corpus use recurringly. The learners gained more familiarity with analysis procedures, such as concordance searches and collocates, which proved to be useful instruments in enhancing intensive reading skills. The learners’ investigations and the teacher’s prompt support and helpful monitoring provided authentic material to foster intensive reading techniques and skills. Continuous cross-checking activities of corpus examination and data findings allowed the learners to implement their writing skills and counter their lack of confidence in using epistemic and deontic modal expressions. Finally, the pedagogic function of cross-collaboration (teacher and learners) raised the learners’ awareness of language use in context in such a way that a corpus-based approach enabled them to use English functions and lexis more correctly, in both written and spoken discourse.

References Aston G. 1995. Corpora in language pedagogy: matching theory and practice. In G. Cook / B. Seidlhofer (eds), Principles and Practice in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 257-270. —. 1996. The British National Corpus as a language learner’s resource. In S. Botley / T. Glass / T. McEnery / A. Wilson (eds.), Proceedings of Teaching and Language Corpora 1996. UCREL Technical Papers 9. Lancaster: UCREL: 178-191 —. 1997. Enriching the learning environment: corpora in ELT. In A. Wichmann / T. Flingelstone / T. McEnery / G. Knowles (eds), Teaching and Language Corpora. London: Longman: 51-64. Aston G. / L. Gavioli 2001. Enriching reality: language corpora in language pedagogy. ELT Journal 55/3: 238-246. Barlow M. 1996. Corpora for theory and practice. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 1: 1-37. Bernardini S. 2000. Systematising serendipity: proposals for concordancing large corpora with language learners. In L. Burnard / T. McEnery (eds), Rethinking Language and Pedagogy from a Corpus Perspective. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang: 225-234. —. 2002. Serendipity expanded: exploring new directions for discovery learning. In B. Kettemann / G. Marko (eds), Teaching and Learning by Doing Corpus Analysis. Papers from the Fourth International Conference on Teaching and Language Corpora, Graz 19-24 July

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2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi: 165-182. —. 2004. Corpora in the classroom: an overview and some reflections on future developments. In J. Sinclair (ed.), How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 1536. Biber D. / S. Conrad / R. Reppen 1998. Corpus Linguistics. Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bybee J. / S. Fleischman 1995. Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Coates J. 1983. The Semantic of Modal Auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm. —. 1995. The expression of root and epistemic possibility in English. In J. Bybee / S. Fleischman (eds), Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 55-66. Gavioli L. 1997. Exploring texts through the concordancer: guiding the learner. In A. Wichmann / T. Flingelstone / T. McEnery / G. Knowles (eds), Teaching and Language Corpora. London: Longman: 83-99. Johns T. 1991. Should you be persuaded: two examples of data-driven learning. In T. Johns / P. King (eds), Classroom Concordancing. ELR Journal 4: 1-16. Leech G. 1997. Teaching and language corpora. In A. Wichmann / T. Flingelstone / T. McEnery / G. Knowles (eds), Teaching and Language Corpora. London: Longman: 1-23. —. 2003. Modality on the move: the English modal auxiliaries 1961-1992. In R. Facchinetti / M. Krug / F. Palmer (eds), Modality in Contemporary English. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter: 223240. Leonzini L. / J. Baldoni 2009. Implementing reading skills: from extensive to intensive. In G. Mansfield / C. Taylor (eds), 1997-2007: L’AICLU e la politica linguistica nelle università italiane. Supergrafica: Parma: 135-143. Leonzini L. 2012. The unbearable heaviness of philosophy made lighter: the unbearable effectiveness of a CLIL approach. In C. Taylor / M. Muscarà (eds), Identità e dignità: AICLU per le lingue del mondo. Lenfrote (EN): Eunco Edizioni: 197-222. McEnery T. / A. Wilson 2001. Corpus Linguistics (2nd edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McEnery T. / A. Hardie 2012. Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mithun M. 1999. The Language of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Palmer F. 1979. Modality and the English Modals. London and New

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York: Longman. —. 1986. The English Verb (2nd edition). London and New York: Longman. —. 1987. Mood and Modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1990. Modality and the English Modals (2nd edition). London and New York: Longman. —. 1995. Negation and the modals of possibility and necessity. In J. Bybee / S. Fleischman (eds), Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 453-472. —. 2001. Mood and Modality. (2nd edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2003. Modality in English: theoretical, descriptive and typological issues. In R. Facchinetti / M. Krug / F. Palmer (eds), Modality in Contemporary English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter: 117. Perkins M. R. 1983. Modal Expressions in English. London: Frances Pinter. Sinclair J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1996. The search for units of meaning. Textus 9/1: 75-106. Stubbs M. 1996. Text and Corpus Analysis. Computer-assisted Studies of Language and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2001a. Text corpora and problems of interpretations: a response to Widdowson. Applied Linguistics 22/2: 149-172. —. 2001b. Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.

 

CHAPTER TEN TEACHING ENGLISH FOR TOURISM: A PHRASEOLOGICAL AND CULTURAL APPROACH ELENA MANCA UNIVERSITY OF SALENTO, ITALY

Introduction Tourism has become one of the most important sectors in the global economy and is often considered one of the main tools which may help promote the economic, social, and cultural growth of a country. Until recently, tourism has been studied particularly from a sociological perspective (Dann 1996; Boyer / Viallon 1994) and only in the last few years has the language of tourism been extensively researched (Manca 2002, 2008, 2011, 2012a, 2013; Calvi 2005; Fodde / Denti 2005; Cappelli 2006, 2012; Maci 2010, 2012). New theories on this type of special language show that it is highly phraseological and also characterized by a close relationship with the cultural values of each country. As a consequence, if the main aim of tourist language is to attract customers from all over the world, experts in the field should be trained both from a linguistic and a sociocultural perspective. However, neither the phraseological approach nor the influence of culture on language are adequately taken into account in the tourist training domain, and textbooks dealing with English for tourism still tend to focus on single words rather than on phrases: they provide lists of words according to specific semantic fields, such as transport, accommodation, leisure time and so on. Furthermore, different ways in which similar concepts can be verbalized by different cultures are not even mentioned or taken into account. However, as Halliday (1978) argues, having a good knowledge of a language is not enough because social and cultural contexts constrain the

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use of words. As a result, language should not be considered as constituted by single words but by phrases and texts within communities. For this reason, lexis and the meaningful relations that words entertain with other words within different contexts (Halliday 1985; Sinclair 1991) should be at the basis of language teaching and learning. In the light of this phraseological and socio-cultural approach to language, we will briefly overview some of the textbooks used in Italian high schools and university courses to teach English for tourism, and will propose additional activities for students. The relationship between language and cultural aspects will be considered particularly within the teaching of English for tourism in university language courses.

The phraseological approach to language Phraseology has been studied by many scholars over the years. Cowie (1994: 3168) defines phraseology as “the study of the structure, meaning and use of word combinations”. Sinclair (1996: 82) talks about the phraseological tendency of features of language patterning, where “words tend to go together and make meanings by their combinations”. Gries (2008: 6) defines a phraseologism as the co-occurrence of a form or a lemma of a lexical item and one or more additional linguistic elements of various kinds which function as one semantic unit in a clause or sentence and whose frequency of co-occurrence is greater than expected on the basis of chance. According to Sinclair (2008: xv ff) phraseology has been a neglected area for a long time for a number of reasons: it does not make a sharp division between lexis and grammar, it adopts a holistic view which starts from the phrase, and it prioritizes syntagmatic patterns over paradigmatic ones. However, with the advent of corpora new ways of analysing texts have shown the high frequency of repeated linguistic events which confirm the crucial importance of phrasal combination. Following Cheng et al. (2008: 236), in this paper the term phraseology is used to describe the tendency for words to be co-selected by speakers and writers to achieve meanings. Co-selection refers to the habitual selection of two or more items together and involves the co-occurrence of lexical items (collocational patterns) and the co-occurrence of grammatical patterns (colligational features) (Tognini Bonelli 2001: 101). The units thus identified are lexicogrammatical units where grammar and lexis are not separated but interdependent. For this reason, phraseology focuses on phrase building,

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from word to collocates to colligates and to its co-selection with semantic preference and semantic prosody. The centrality of phraseology in language is described by the idiom principle (Sinclair 1991: 110). According to this principle a “language user has available to him or her a large number of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices”. This means that only a few words are chosen according to the open-choice principle (ibid.: 109), that is to say, considering only local restraints, such as grammaticalness. Cowie (1998:1) identifies important implications of the tendency of words towards idiomaticity and criticizes traditional, atomistic views of language and language teaching: The notion that native-like proficiency in a language depends crucially on a stock of prefabricated units – or ‘prefabs’ – varying in complexity and internal stability is now set in critical opposition to the atomistic view, rooted in generative theory, that the workings of a language can be explained by a system of rules of general applicability, a lexicon largely made up of minimal units and a set of basic principles of semantic interpretation.

Starting from the 1990s, linguists (Pawley / Syder 1983; Sinclair / Renouf 1988; Willis 1990, 1996; Lewis 1993, 2000, 2008; Nattinger / DeCarrico 1992) began to consider phraseology as being at the basis of language teaching, and, more recently, the centrality of phraseology in language teaching has further increased its visibility in several studies (see for example Sinclair 2004; Granger 2008, 2011; Milizia 2012). However, an overview of the textbooks and syllabi used to teach tourist English in high schools and university courses shows that the phraseological approach is anything but central and that it frequently occupies a very marginal role. This may be due to the fact that traditional approaches to the teaching of English have always considered the word as the basic unit of meaning and do not take into account the meaningful relations words entertain with other words (1996:76).

Phraseology and language teaching According to Pawley and Syder (1983: 191-192) fluent and idiomatic control of a language strongly depends on the knowledge of a body of “lexicalised sentence stems”, that is to say units of clause length or longer whose grammatical form and lexical content is wholly or largely fixed. Most of these units are not true idioms but rather are regular form-meaning pairings. Ordinary mature speakers are considered to know hundreds of

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thousands of these units. Pawley and Syder maintain (ibid.: 205) that only a minority of spoken clauses are entirely novel creations. Speakers tend to use clauses which are entirely familiar, memorized sequences. In language production, these strings are recalled as automatically chained strings. For this reason, for Sinclair and Renouf (1988:148) the main focus of syllabi should be on the commonest word forms in the language, their central patterns of usage, and the combination which they typically form. Additional lists should obviously be included in a syllabus in order to achieve a balance between natural usage and utility (ibid.: 152). However, the lexical syllabus proposed by Sinclair and Renouf (ibid.:154) is not based on a piecemeal acquisition of a large vocabulary: rather, it concentrates on making full use of the words the learner already knows focusing more on recombination than on addition. Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992: 1) define lexical phrases as chunks of language of varying length, ideal units which can be exploited for language teaching. According to Nattinger (1980: 341), “for a great deal of the time anyway, language production consists of piecing together the ready-made units appropriate for a particular situation and […] comprehension relies on knowing which of these patterns to predict in these situations.” The lexical approach is developed by Lewis (1993: 95) who says that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to produce lexical phrases as unanalysed wholes or ‘chunks’. These chunks are the starting point for the learner to perceive patterns, morphology, and other features of language. For this reason, teachers should be more inclined to direct learners’ attention to chunks of language which are as large as possible (Manca 2008: 3). More attention should be paid to lexis and the different kinds of multi-word chunks; listening and reading; activities based on L1/L2 comparisons and translation; the use of dictionaries as a resource for active learning; probable rather than possible English; patterns and aid retrieval; the fact that language learners may meet outside the classroom (ibid.: 15). In order to check whether the phraseological approach to language is central to the textbooks of English for tourism mostly used in Italian high schools and university language courses a brief and general summary of the main approaches adopted in these textbooks will be provided in the following section.

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Teaching English for tourism: an overview The aim of this section is to provide an overview of the approaches adopted in four textbooks of English for tourism mostly used in Italian high schools and language courses at the time of writing. The textbooks considered are: Tourism at Work (2010), Travel and Tourism (2013), Gateway to Tourism (2008), and Tourism Essentials (2012). These textbooks are divided into sections and into units. Sections deal with general basic topics regarding tourism such as the tourism industry, travelling, transport, accommodation, destinations, and so on. Units generally contain activities relating to vocabulary, speaking, writing and consolidation. In Textbook 1, each section is divided into three units. Each unit contains five parts labelled as info-files where basic information is introduced through readings and comprehension tests; vocabulary which contains activities on lexis accompanied by several pictures; practice containing a variety of texts with exercises; speaking where dialogues, listening, pair-work and other activities are provided; writing which focuses on the development and improvement of writing skills through letters, brochures, itineraries and so on. Let us consider, for example, section 1 of Textbook 1 titled Planning a trip. The vocabulary part for this section starts with an exercise on geographical features: learners are required to match some words reported in a box (such as lake, glacier, mountain, waterfall) with the illustrations provided. These words have to be reused in the exercises which follow, a fill-in-the-gap exercise and a matching exercise. No patterns of usage for these words are provided, nor the most frequent adjectives or verbs they collocate with. The same applies to the other parts constituting the section. In the speaking part, for example, learners are not provided with chunks of language they can reuse to talk about tourist attractions but only with place-names and names of famous monuments or attractions. When chunks are provided, such as definitions of terms, they are too long to be memorized by learners and to be reused without resorting to further readings of the same text the exercises refer to. Textbook 2 is organized according to seven learning units. Each unit has two steps. Each step is constituted by two macro-sections labelled Know-how and Professional Competences. Section 1 of this textbook is titled Tourism Industry. A long text on the development of tourism is followed by a vocabulary exercise where single words such as journey, camping, caravanning, mass tourism have to be matched to their definitions. After a comprehension test where learners are required to tick

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the true or false boxes and a summary test where learners have to complete a text by using some words provided in a box, two speaking activities are proposed. Learners are invited to ask and answer questions about reasons for travelling in the past and to talk about their own reasons for travelling. However, even if the first of these speaking activities can be carried out by reusing the information provided in the opening text and in the following exercises, learners may find it difficult to talk about their own reasons for travelling without identifying first some useful phraseology. Speaking activities should always be preceded by activities which focus on the creation of lists of phrases referring to the semantic field or to the topic which will be the object of the conversation. Learners who cannot have access to a solid repertoire of phraseology will certainly fail in this type of activity and will be likely to refuse to take part in similar activities in the following lessons. Some useful phraseology (such as to go/be on holiday, to have/to take a holiday, to go on a trip) is provided later in the section. However, in order to help memorization, learners themselves should isolate phrases from a text. The same phrases should then be reused in the exercises following the text. Textbook 3 is organized into eight modules focusing on different topics. Each module is divided into two to four units. This textbook has an approach to language which is very similar to those of the textbooks previously analysed. Learners are not required to isolate phrases from the texts provided and vocabulary still focuses on single words and their definition. Pair work and speaking activities require a command of the phraseology of the language that learners cannot have acquired through the activities proposed in the units. The same can be said for Textbook 4 which consists of 16 units focusing on topics such as accommodation, bookings, transport, and catering. This textbook does not provide activities which may guide the learners towards the isolation of phraseology or activities which may help the learners to reuse and consequently memorize, useful phraseology about the topic dealt with in the section. However, although textbooks for tourist English turn out to be more term-based rather than phrase-based, teachers could propose additional activities to their learners using the material provided in the textbooks or extra material taken from the Internet and guide their attention to the isolation of useful phraseology which will be reused in exercises and activities to be carried out in class.

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Teaching English for tourism: additional activities According to Lewis (1993: 44), efficient language learning means learners turning a high proportion of the ‘input’ to which they are exposed into ‘intake’. In order to do this, they need to observe this input and notice the units, the lexical items from which it is constructed. Let us consider, for example, the following text taken from the textbook Gateway to Tourism (2008), and focus on the word ‘trip’. These texts are used for a reading comprehension in the section Why Travel. Additional activities to carry out on these texts will be proposed below. A trip? What’s a trip? Well, I think it’s usually used when we talk about going away for a short time. We say “day trip”, “school trip” and “business trip” for example. You “take a trip out of town for the weekend – you could say “we’re organizing a ski-ing trip next weekend” for example. It’s possible to use it to talk about travelling to a foreign country, like “We are going on a trip to Italy this summer”, but this means you are going and coming back in a short space of time. It’s definitely used as a noun and not as a verb: “to trip” means “to fall” in the UK, but it also refers to using drugs. In order to help learners memorize the different language patterns the word trip is embedded, and in the other useful phrases related to the word trip teachers should invite them to identify phrases. This activity should be guided by the teachers only for the first few times. Later, when learners have become familiar with such an approach, they can work in pairs or autonomously. The useful phrases that can be identified in the text above are: 1) day trip 2) school trip 3) business trip 4) to go away for a short time 5) to take a trip 6) to organize a trip 7) to go on a trip 8) to travel to a foreign country 9) to take a trip out of town 10) to go and come back in a short space of time

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Learners are provided with translations by the teacher or, depending on their level of English and familiarity with dictionary searching, can find the Italian translation equivalents on their own. Memorization takes place during the process of identification of phrases. In order to reinforce memorization and make the learners reuse the phrases, a fill-in-the-blank exercise or a multiple-choice exercise can be proposed. The same text or a text with similar phrases can be assigned, as exemplified below. Items to be eliminated are to be decided according to the students’ level of English. The one proposed below is fairly easy: A trip? What’s a trip? Well, I think it’s usually used when we talk about going away for a ___________ (1) time. We say “day trip”, “school trip” and “business trip” for example. You “___________ (2) a trip out of town for the weekend – you could say “we’re ___________ (3) a ski-ing trip next weekend” for example. It’s possible to use it to talk about travelling to a foreign ___________ (4), like “We are going ___________ (5) a trip ___________ (6) Italy this summer”, but this means you are going and coming back in a short ___________ (7) of time. It’s definitely used as a noun and not as a verb: “to trip” means “to fall” in the UK, but it also refers to using drugs. Teachers could then decide to provide learners with extra material taken from the Internet, for example. The following text is taken and slightly adapted from the website www.ehow.com1 and is titled How to organize a trip to Europe: If you’re planning on taking a trip to Europe, you have a few options to make this happen. You could go through a tour company, who puts together your itinerary and even has a tour guide. Everything is arranged by them in advance, such as the plane flight, what sights you will see, where you will go and how much time you will have at each place. The only problem with this is that your family may not want to see The Gothic Cathedral in Germany, or visit an Eastern European country on your way to Switzerland from the Netherlands. If you organize the trip yourself, they will be more involved in your planning. However, you can decide how long to stay at each place, and only go to those places you and your family wish to go. This article will show you how to organize a trip to Europe.

1

Accessed December 2013.

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In this short text, learners are exposed to patterns which are very similar to those identified in their textbook and may also add other useful patterns, phrases, and expressions referring to trips and journeys: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) 9) 10)

Plan/take/organize a trip to To have a few options To go through a tour company To put together an itinerary To have a tour guide To be arranged in advance (To arrange) the plane flight To visit a country To see some sights To stay at (a place)

This activity should be followed by exercises such as a fill-in-the-blank exercise, a multiple-choice test, matching exercises, jumbled sentences, translation activities, role plays and written activities. Learners could also be asked to make a list of what they need to have for a trip to Europe: they could mention, for example, a passport and the teacher may provide them with two verbs frequently collocating with this item, that is to say have and apply for; another word may be tickets, which should be stored together with plane/train and the verbs book and purchase. Translation and written activities as well as written production should be carried out only when learners show they have mastered the phraseology identified in the texts proposed and reinforced through fill-inthe-blank, multiple-choice and matching exercises. Sentences to be translated should contain the phrases and patterns identified. For example: 1. La mia scuola sta organizzando una gita scolastica in primavera. 2. Vorrei fare un viaggio in una nazione straniera e sto cercando un’agenzia di viaggio che organizzi il mio itinerario. 3. I biglietti aerei devono essere acquistati in anticipo. Role play could involve two or three students performing the roles of a travel agent and a customer talking about a trip to the US or to another foreign country. Therefore, the steps proposed in this phrase-based learning process are Read – Identify – Learn – Reuse, with two main implications. Learners acquire actual patterns of usage (of probable rather than possible English) quite easily and are consequently more fluent in oral and written

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production. They will be thus more encouraged to take an active role in the learning process with obvious results. This approach is not limited to high levels of competence only but it proves to be adequate and valid for lower levels as well, such as A1 and A2 levels. The activities proposed above may be addressed to an A2 level group, corresponding to a third year in Italian high schools.

Phraseology and culture in university language courses of English for tourism A similar approach could be used in the teaching of English for tourism in university language courses. The higher level learners have reached allows the teacher to start with a text such as the one reported below. The text and the activities proposed below may be adequate for a B2/C1 level of English which correspond to a third year of a BA course in foreign languages or to the first and second year of other MA courses, such as in Economics and Tourism Science. The text proposed is taken from the home page of Kerryanna Country House (www.kerryanna.co.uk), a country house located in Cornwall: Welcome to Kerryanna Country House 4 star Kerryanna Country House is situated amongst 2 acres of beautiful gardens, surrounded by farmland, wildlife and flowers and complemented by a secluded outdoor swimming pool. Standing at the head of the valley, overlooking Mevagissey, we have outstanding views of the picturesque village, surrounding countryside and sea glimpses. Just a 10minute walk to the harbour and village where you will find an exciting range of shops, restaurants and pubs, together with the hustle and bustle of a working fishing port. The phraseology that can be identified in this short text is, obviously, slightly more complex and suitable for the level of English of the target learners: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Situated amongst 2 acres of Surrounded by farmland Secluded outdoor swimming pool To have outstanding views of Picturesque village Surrounding countryside 10-minute-walk to Working fishing port

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Since the words situated, views, and countryside are quite central in the language of tourism, teachers could provide learners with additional lexico-grammatical information on these words through corpus data. For example, situated can be used in units of meaning with different functions (Manca 2012b): to express distance from a place (1), to describe the convenience of the location (2), to describe the place of the location in general (3) or referring to a precise geographical place (4): 1. 2. 3. 4.

… situated 2 miles from the village … ideally situated for touring the West Country … situated in a quiet village … situated at the heart of the Lizard peninsula

The word views could be proposed to learners together with its most frequent collocates and some corpus examples, for example panoramic, spectacular, magnificent, wonderful, stunning, beautiful, lovely, breathtaking, superb, fine, outstanding, excellent, splendid, great, uninterrupted, to have, to enjoy. It could also be taught contrastively with the apparently synonymous ‘landscape’, in exercises such as the following one, where learners are required to match the words views and landscape with their collocates:

Match the items below with the words views or landscape: farming – outstanding – rolling – panoramic – stunning – hilly – lovely

Views

__________

__________

__________

__________

__________

Landscape

__________

__________

__________

__________

__________

and such as the following one where learners have to tick the correct sentence, that is to say the sentence where the right co-selection is reported:

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Tick the correct sentence 9 Large family suite with fireplace and stunning views of the countryside Large family suite with fireplace and stunning landscape of the countryside Enjoy views over fells and valleys! Enjoy the landscape over fells and valleys! Sparkling sea and a rolling landscape provide the backdrop for your self-catering cottage holiday. Sparkling sea and rolling views provide the backdrop for your selfcatering cottage holiday. The cottage is set in a farming landscape dominated by crops and standard breeds of livestock. The cottage is set in farming views dominated by crops and standard breeds of livestock. Learners in university language courses will be certainly required to work more contrastively with their own language. Working contrastively between, for example, the English and the Italian languages means being aware of the strong influence that the two different contexts of culture operate on the two languages. These differences are visible in the way concepts are expressed through words. For this reason, the phraseological approach should be combined with the cultural approach which classifies the features of the language used by different cultures according to value orientations. Katan (2006: 60-61) proposes the following cluster to compare the features of the Italian and the British cultures in transactional communication, such as the tourist one:

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UK: LCC (Low Context Cultures) Text (explicitness) Information (facts) Low information load (small chunks) KISS (keep it short and simple) Reader friendly (peer/peer) Instrumental Linear (cause-effect, main points) Informal Direct

ITALY: HCC (High Context Cultures) Context (implicitness) Communication (feelings, opinions) High information load (large chunks) KILC (keep it long and complete) Writer oriented (expert/non-expert) Expressive Circular (background, details) Formal Indirect

Table 1. UK/Italian cluster for transactional communication The tendency of British culture towards explicitness and facts and of Italian culture towards implicitness and feelings is particularly visible in the language of tourist websites (Manca 2012a, 2013). The following sentences describe the same concepts but in two different ways: 1. Victorian farmhouse commanding magnificent views of the Cotswolds 2. L’agriturismo è immerso nel paesaggio collinare che si affaccia sulla Val di Chiana (lit.transl: The farmhouse is immersed in the hilly landscape which overlooks the Val di Chiana) Although the usage of ‘immersed’ in the literal translation provided above may sound unconsciously familiar to some English native speakers, it is never used in British tourist websites, as shown by Manca (2012a). The Italian counterpart ‘immerso’ well accounts for the needs of the Italian culture to adopt a description which focuses more on opinions and feelings rather than on facts. Such an aspect of tourist language cannot be disregarded in a university tourism language course. For this reason, most of the activities proposed to learners should be translation activities, and ad hoc created corpora should be available to learners in the translation training. Teachers could also provide learners with literal or wrong translations in order to make them understand the relationship between phraseology and culture (see Manca 2012a, 2013). Some examples of translation exercises that can be proposed to learners are reported below:

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Modify the following translations as shown in the example reported below: 1. Tra montagne e mari incontaminati è possibile assaporare il fascino di una natura intatta ed autentica, ricca di tradizioni. Between unpolluted mountains and seas it is possible to taste the charm of a nature which is still intact, authentic, and full of traditions. 9 Beautiful unspoiled countryside, mountains, sea, and local traditions will make your stay a memorable experience. 2. Questo è il luogo ideale per tutti coloro che amano la tranquillità della campagna e che vogliano trascorrere le proprie vacanze nel rispetto della natura e godendo del piacere di un assoluto relax. This is the ideal place for those who love the tranquility of the countryside and that want to spend a holiday respecting nature and feeling the pleasure of an absolute relax. 3. Immersa nel paesaggio naturale tra Nurachi e Cabras, la nostra struttura è la soluzione perfetta per chi vuole trascorrere una vacanza in tutta tranquillità. Immersed in the natural landscape which stretches between Nurachi and Cabras, our farmhouse is the perfect solution for those who want to spend a holiday in tranquility. In order to carry out this exercise, learners need to know both the phraseology of the English language of tourism and the features of transactional communication of the British culture.

Conclusion According to Lewis (2008: 51) an individual word or multi-word lexical items can be acquired by meeting them a number of times and in their actual context of usage. He argues (ibid.) that “each time you meet a word in context and (at least partly) understand it, you understand more of its meaning, and gradually integrate it into your lexicon for immediate access”.

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If language works predominantly according to the idiom principle, as is shown repeatedly by many corpus studies, why should learners be exposed mainly to terms and only marginally to phrases? Some teachers may argue that learners, particularly at the beginning of a second language learning process, may find it difficult to memorize multi-word units and, for this reason, they prefer to adopt a more traditional term-based approach. However, if chunks and expressions are recycled by teachers, learners will memorize them unconsciously and will improve their ability to speak idiomatically and their fluency both in oral and written production. Furthermore, the activity of identifying phraseology in texts encourages students to take an active role in their learning process. Learners will be able to memorize chunks and expressions more easily and this will act as a stimulus to take part particularly in speaking activities, which are frequently considered as too difficult by learners. University language courses for tourism should also consider the influence that culture has on language and on the way concepts are expressed. Learners should be guided by teachers in order to realize that communication, particularly in the tourist field, does not only require a change of code but also a change in the way meanings are transferred from one language/culture to another. Unfortunately, the phraseological and the cultural approaches in the tourist training domain are still overly disregarded or considered of limited importance, with results that are too frequently visible on many Italian tourist websites addressing an international audience.

References Cappelli G. 2006. Sun, Sea, Sex and the Unspoilt Countryside. How the English Language Makes Tourists out of Readers. Pari: Pari Publishing. —. 2012. Travelling in space. Spatial representation in English and Italian tourism discourse. TEXTUS 1: 19-35. Cheng W. / C. Greaves / J. Sinclair / M. Warren 2008. Uncovering the extent of the phraseological tendency: towards a systematic analysis of concgrams. Applied Linguistics 30/2: 236-252. Cowie P.A. 1994. Phraseology. In R.E. Asher (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon: 3168-3171. Cowie P.A. (ed.) 1998. Phraseology. Theory, Analysis and Applications. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Dann G. 1996. The Language of Tourism. A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Wellington: CAB International. Boyer M. / P. Viallon 1994. La Communication Touristique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Calvi M.V. 2005. Il linguaggio spagnolo del turismo. Viareggio: Baroni Editore. Ducati R. / E. Gardella / D. Allen 2008. New Gateway to Tourism. Milano: Lang. Fodde L. / O. Denti 2005. Cross-cultural representations in tourist discourse: the image of Sardinia in English tourist guides. In M. Bondi / N. Maxwell (eds), Cross-Cultural Encounters – Linguistic Perspective. Roma: Officina Edizioni: 116-129. Granger S. / F. Meunier (eds) 2008. Phraseology. An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. —. 2011. From phraseology to pedagogy: challenges and prospects. In T. Herbst / P. Uhrig / S. Schüller (eds), Chunks in the Description of Language. A Tribute to John Sinclair. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter: 123-146 Gries S. Th. 2008. Phraseology and linguistic theory: a brief survey. In S. Granger / F. Meunier (eds), Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 3-25. Halliday M.A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday M.A.K. / R. Hasan 1985. Language, Context and Text: A Social Semiotic Perspective. Melbourne: Deakin University Press. Invernizzi F. / S. Mastrantonio 2012. Tourism Essentials. Torino: Loescher Editore. Katan D. 2006. It’s a question of life or death: cultural differences in advertising private pensions. In N. Vasta (ed.), Forms of Promotion. Texts, Contexts and Cultures. Bologna: Pàtron Editore: 55-80. Lewis M. 1993. The Lexical Approach. The State of ELT and a Way Forward. London: Commercial Colour Press. Lewis M. 2000 (ed.). Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Hove, England: Language Teaching Publications. Lewis M. 2008. Implementing the Lexical Approach. Putting Theory into Practice. London: Heinle. Maci S. 2010. The Language of Tourism. Bergamo: CELSB. —. 2012. Click here, book now. Discursive strategies of tourism on the web. TEXTUS 1: 137-156. Manca E. 2008. From phraseology to culture: qualifying adjectives in the language of tourism. In U. Römer / R. Schulze (eds), Special Issue

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Patterns, Meaningful Units and Specialized Discourses. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics: 368-385. —. 2011. Corpus linguistics and cultural studies: a combined approach in the translation process. In M. Bondi / S Cacchiani / G. Palumbo (eds), Clavier 09 Corpus Linguistics and Language Variation, Special Issue of Rassegna Italiana di Linguistica Applicata 1/2: 263-285. —. 2012a. Translating the language of tourism across cultures: from functionally complete units of meaning to cultural equivalence. TEXTUS 1: 51-67. —. 2012b. Synonymy and language teaching. In F. Dalziel / S. Gesuato / M.T. Musacchio (eds), A Lifetime of English Studies: Essays in Honour of Carol Taylor Torsello. Padova: Il Poligrafo: 381-391. —. 2013. Describing holidays through the five senses: a contrastive analysis of Italian and British tourist websites. In E. Manca / F. Bianchi (eds), Tourism and Tourist Promotion Around the World. A Linguistic and Socio-cultural Perspective. Lecce: Salento University Publishing: 109-124. Milizia D. 2012. Phraseology in Political Discourse A Corpus Linguistic Approach in the Classroom. Milano: LED. Montanari D. / A.R. Rizzo 2013. Travel and Tourism. London: Pearson Longman. Nattinger J. 1980. A lexical phrase grammar for ESL. TESOL Quarterly, 14: 337-344. Nattinger J.R. / J. DeCarrico 1992. Lexical Phrases and Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Malley K. 2010. Tourism at Work. Milano: Europass. Pawley A. / F.H. Syder 1983. Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In J.C. Richards / R.W. Schmidt (eds), Language and Communication. London: Longman: 191-225. Sinclair J. / M.A. Renouf 1988. A lexical syllabus for language learning. In R.A. Carter / M. J. McCarthy (eds), Vocabulary and Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman: 140-160. Sinclair J. 1991. Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1996. The search for units of meaning. TEXTUS IX/1: 71-106. Sinclair J. 2004 (ed.). How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sinclair J. 2008. Preface. In S. Granger / F. Meunier (eds.). Phraseology. An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: xv-xviii.

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Tognini Bonelli E. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tognini Bonelli E. / E. Manca 2002. Welcoming children, pets and guests: a problem of non-equivalence in the languages of ‘Agriturismo’ and ‘Farmhouse Holidays’. TEXTUS XV/2: 317-334. Willis D.1990. The Lexical Syllabus. London: Collins. Willis J. / D. Willis (eds) 1996. Challenge and Change in Language Teaching. Oxford: Heinemann.

CHAPTER ELEVEN THE PASSIVE VOICE IN POLITICAL SPEECHES: A CORPUS-DRIVEN STUDY DENISE MILIZIA UNIVERSITY OF BARI ‘ALDO MORO’, ITALY

Introduction Although the passive voice is extensively covered in grammar books of all levels, starting from A2 up to C2 levels, as acknowledged by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, some structures are regarded as a stumbling block for students, mainly those where a straightforward equivalent is missing in the L1. This project was carried out with undergraduate students at the Department of Political Science, where English is taught in the first year for International and European Studies and Private and Public Administration, and in the second year for Science of Social Services. The number of attendees is huge – around 250 for SPRISE and SAPP and 500 for SSS – thus the conditions in which the lessons are taken are not the best, not to mention the limited time and resources which characterize our courses. In the entry test that students took at the beginning of the semester it was found that the level in the classroom varied from A2 to B2, with only few students holding a C1 certificate issued by Cambridge University or by Trinity College. In the questionnaire they had to fill in for the survey, they wrote that they were all familiar with the passive voice, that they had dealt with it in high school, but when they were asked to provide examples they all came up with instances we would never use in real life, such as The song was sung by me or The book is read by the boy. It is clear that, although their examples were grammatically correct, or grammatically well-formed, to borrow Chomsky’s (1957) terminology, being composed of a subject, a verb, and an agent, they are perceived as cumbersome,

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being more the result of contrived and invented examples rather than the product of natural language. Their examples were most certainly the passive version of a sentence which would instead be very frequent and correct in the active voice but which, in the passive, provided bland and unconvincing examples that are the best that a human being can concoct unaided (Sinclair 2002: 339). Although common in the active, their examples sounded somewhat odd in the passive, besides being unattested (Milizia 2012a: 59). What complicates the picture further – and this should be borne in mind in the teaching process – is that, although some verbs are possible in the passive, they simply are not used in the passive voice very often. The bread and butter of our courses are the speeches of British and American politicians: students at Political Science are particularly interested in political speeches since they do not major in English nor are they likely to become language professionals, and one of the main skills they will need in their professional lives is giving presentations, thus what they mostly need is recorded language spoken in situations in which they are likely to find themselves (Mauranen 2004b). Needless to say, none of the students had ever used or heard of corpora before, and careful initiation to corpus skills is crucial before corpora can conquer ordinary learners in school and university. It is of course up to the teacher to motivate the students and start with easy tasks, because difficult tasks would certainly turn any novice against corpora and they would very likely lose interest fast (Mauranen ibid.: 100; Milizia: 2013). Students were actively involved, in groups and sub-groups, in the gathering of the corpus itself: the European Studies group took care of assembling the speeches, interviews and statements delivered by David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair; the Public and Private Administration group took care of assembling the speeches, remarks and press briefings of Barack Obama and George Bush. The data were all retrieved from the institutional websites: www.number10.gov.uk and www.whitehouse.gov; the data are all free of charge. The Social Services students gathered the speeches delivered by other politicians from the previous and the current administration, such as Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Ron Paul, Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, as well as Press Conferences, with the speeches of Press Secretaries Jay Carney, Robert Gibbs, and Bill Burton. At the time of writing, the corpus totals 20 million running words. Another group assembled the spoken corpus of Italian politicians, including speeches delivered by Matteo Renzi, Enrico Letta, Angelino Alfano, Silvio Berlusconi, Pierluigi Bersani, Rosy Bindi, Emma Bonino,

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Mario Monti, and Nichi Vendola. The Italian corpus is much smaller in size than the British and the American corpora, comprising only 2 million running words. The students said that assembling the corpus was great fun. They were constantly monitored in the process, because even though assembling a corpus is an easy task, it requires great care and concentration. It must be said that today most students and researchers tend to assemble their own corpora, which is something learners really enjoy doing, in that when working with a corpus they themselves have collected rather than with one provided by the teacher or already available online, they feel proud owners of their own research (Tognini Bonelli 2001). In the next section a short overview of the use of the passive is provided; we then briefly introduce some structures which are easily digested by Italian students, whether or not there is a perfect equivalence in the L1, as well as some structures which, albeit highly frequent in the political spoken corpus and in spoken corpora in general, are ignored altogether in pedagogical texts. Some possible translations are provided with the aid of several online resources. The be-, get-, and becomepassives are illustrated in a separate section, and the Italian spoken political corpus is also looked at, to try and find similarities and differences between the English and the Italian reliance on the passive, in terms of frequency and usage. In the final section the combination of voice and aspect is explored, and this part was the most prioritized in the classroom, in that it was discovered that English usage deviates significantly from Italian usage.

The passive voice: a short overview In the survey that was submitted to the students at the beginning of the semester it was found that, whenever possible, the passive voice is avoided altogether. This was corroborated in their oral performance. It is true that avoidance of the passive voice has been widely advocated for many years. George Orwell, for example, as early as 1946, in his essay Politics and the English Language, recommended the active voice as an elementary principle of composition: “Never use the passive where you can use the active”. Yet, despite his advice to avoid the passive, Orwell’s essay employs the passive voice in about 20 percent of its constructions. Three decades earlier, in 1918, William Strunk already warned against excessive use of the passive voice, arguing that the active voice is always more direct and rigorous than the passive: I shall always remember my first visit to Boston is much better than My first visit to Boston shall

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always be remembered by me. The latter sentence is less direct, less bold, and less concise, and if the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me”, i.e. My first visit to Boston will always be remembered, it becomes indefinite: is it the writer, or some person undisclosed, or the world at large, that will always remember this visit? (Strunk 1918: 18-19). What Strunk fails to mention in his example, though, is that “My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me” is unlikely to occur in real language, and this sentence seems more an unnatural and affected form of an active structure turned into a passive structure in a rather constrained way. In his brief guide, Strunk was trying to give the principal requirements of plain English style, and almost 100 years later the Plain Language Movement has been particularly influential in advocating the demise of the passive voice, claiming that “Unless you have a reason not to, use the active voice.” The passive voice is still today victim of a sustained attack in usage manuals because it is regarded as a clumsy and awkward construction (Leech et al. 2012: 151). It has been noted that the use of the passive largely depends on the text type, and Corpus Linguistics has been able to substantiate the view expressed in many style manuals of the passive as a feature typical of scientific as well as of academic English (ibid.: 147). Biber et al. (2002: 167) argue that the passive is most common in academic prose, where it accounts for about 25% of all finite verbs; it is also common in news, where it accounts for about 15% of all finite verbs; in contrast, passives are rare in conversation, constituting only 2% of all finite verbs (Biber et al. 1999: 475). In prescriptive legal texts approximately 25% of all finite verbal constructions take the passive form (Williams 2004: 228), and the intention is straightforward: it enables a description to be made impersonally, without the agent being expressed, in that what counts more is the effect or the outcome of an action rather than the individuality of the researcher (Scarpa 2001; see also Milizia 2012a: 60). Hence, what would be in rhematic position in the passive gets a thematic position, thus acquiring more importance. New information is normally presented rhematically: the passive allows the thematic element to identify given information. Barber (1985) shows that the passive voice occurs much more frequently in scientific than in non-scientific discourse: 28% in scientific texts vs 3% in general texts. The percentage is especially high in English where the passive is the main device used to depersonalize discourse, whereas Italian has the impersonal operator si, just like the French on and the German man, thus the Italian forms si dice, si pensa, si crede in

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English often take the passive voice: it is said, it is thought, it is believed, where the expletive it takes the normal subject position, as in the following examples: -

-

-

In the economic context, it is said that when the United States sneezes, the United Kingdom catches cold and the north-east of England gets pneumonia Worldwide, at least 600,000 to 800,000 human beings are trafficked across international borders each year. Of those, it is believed that more than 80 percent are women and girls If it is thought that we need a new Bill of Rights and Responsibilities, it could take different forms

It is true that the active form with a generalized subject pronoun such as People say could also be used in such cases, but the evidence of the data has shown that the passive voice is the preferred choice on most occasions. In his book, Murphy (2011: 90-91) devotes a whole chapter to this structure, including cases such as alleged, considered, expected, known, reported, understood. The alleged structure was dealt with in detail in class, and it was interesting to find that in our data the adverb allegedly and passive constructions like You are alleged to be very close to Nicholas Sarkozy were indeed much more common than the impersonal it is/was alleged. Empirical research has shown that, even though Italian learners do not encounter many problems in understanding and in actively using this type of passive, they try to avoid it, not out of compliance with prescriptivist norms but because they find the active form more accessible. In the paragraphs below several forms of passive will be illustrated: some of them are easily digested by Italian students, who can successfully perform both in their written and oral test; some other forms of passive are instead easily learned but more often than not confused in their oral performance where they have to improvise and speak off the cuff, as it were, whereas in writing they can think and rethink, cross out all the mistakes and discard the preliminary drafts, leaving only the finished product to offer to the teacher (Halliday 2002). Lastly, some forms which have no Italian equivalent counterpart, and are therefore avoided altogether, will be analysed in detail.

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The passive: pedagogical texts vs corpora The grammar books we have consulted in class for this project are the following: Biber et al.’s (1999) The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, and The Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English (2002), Carter et al.’s (2011) English Grammar Today, An A-Z of Spoken and Written Grammar, Collins Cobuild English Grammar (2004), Murphy’s (2011) English Grammar in Use, and Vince’s (2009) Advanced Language Practice, English Grammar and Vocabulary. The monolingual dictionaries we have relied on are the Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (2011) and the Collins English Dictionary (2011); the bilingual dictionaries are Collins Desktop Dizionario Inglese-Italiano, ItalianoInglese (2005) and Ragazzini Dizionario Inglese-Italiano, Italian-English (2004; 2012). Starting from the assumption that whatever is found to deviate significantly from native-speaker usage should be prioritized in the classroom (Nesselhauf 2004), the emphasis of the research was not so much on structures where a perfect Italian equivalent is available, such as -

Over the past decade, far too many police officers have been tied up in knots More businesses have been forced to lay off more workers I want every American who has been affected by this disaster to know that […]

which were nevertheless dealt with in class just to break the ice, but rather on structures where there is no equivalent whatsoever, where some packing and repacking of the utterance is often required, and more often than not the passive in the translation tends to disappear altogether. The structures we started with are of the Smoking is not allowed type, where a perfect equivalence with the Italian counterpart seems to hold. We are used to seeing such a warning in hotels and airplanes, and the only difference with the Italian version would be syntactical, with the verb in thematic position, i.e. is not allowed, and smoking in rhematic position (Non è consentito fumare). Thus, sentences like the following: -

The use of the computer is allowed but photography is not If an in-out referendum is allowed in the UK, voters will be asked to choose between a renegotiated form of EU membership and exiting altogether

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-

Interception is allowed in certain limited circumstances

do not usually cause problems for students, in that the Italian counterpart would be rendered almost verbatim. Interestingly, students noticed that when the be allowed structure is followed by an infinitive, i.e. be allowed to, which in our data was indeed the most common in terms of frequency, things start to get complicated: -

Fiat is allowed to take a majority ownership stake in Chrysler We will not accept that a dictator is allowed to massacre his own people In terms of our participation, we will stay until Iraq is allowed to emerge as a free society

In these examples, the noun phrase in the role of the subject in the English passive construction is an indirect object in the associated active construction in Italian: the English subjects Fiat, a dictator, Iraq, in Italian become to Fiat, to a dictator, to Iraq. In Carter et al. (2011) and in the Collins Cobuild English Grammar (2004) this construction is ignored altogether, even though they both take their examples from real English as is actually used in everyday written and spoken language. Murphy (2011: 84-93) dedicates five chapters to the passive voice, and Vince (2009: 33-45) devotes two long chapters to the passive, but both structures, be allowed and be allowed to, are overlooked altogether. Interestingly, the can’t be bothered, the make one’s voice heard, and the get things done structures, where no direct equivalence holds in Italian, have proved to cause very few problems to our students, probably because of their idiomatic pattern: students memorize them as a phrase, almost as a single chunk, making sure that in expressions like make one’s voice heard, for example, one’s is declined for every person, e.g. Europe’s, its, our, their, your, as we shall see below.

The can’t be bothered structure As Sinclair (2008) has argued, dictionaries are almost exclusively focused on the word, so much so that it is difficult to treat a phrase adequately in a dictionary and difficult to find it once it is there. Finding these types of passive in the dictionary was not easy: the Collins English Dictionary (2011) did not provide any reference to the can’t be bothered nor to the make one’s voice heard structure. We looked up under the

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heading bother, but no reference to the passive was found; the bilingual Collins Desktop (2005) provided only one scant reference to it: I can’t be bothered going out or to go out = proprio non mi va di uscire. The bilingual dictionary Ragazzini (2004, 2012) provided a quick mention of the structure, as the Figures below illustrate:

Figure 1. *can’t be bothered in Ragazzini 2004

While Ragazzini 2004 has only a brief reference to it, hinting at the slang type of structure, Ragazzini 2012 adds further details, as Figure 2 shows:

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Figure 2. *can’t be bothered in Ragazzini 2012

It was observed that Ragazzini 2012 had an American flag next to the heading, but quite a few instances of can’t be bothered were found in both British and American political speeches. For reason of space, only three examples are provided below, uttered respectively by Tony Blair (the first two) and Bill Clinton: -

-

We have gone through the last of these detailed negotiations, not because we can't be bothered to go through another, we would go through several if we had to. I think you have read enough on that over the weekend and you can dissect that. I can't be bothered to go back through it all again. You have the refugees in the United States. We don't have them. They're on your shore. They're your problem. We can't be bothered with that.

It is clear from the examples above that the Italian translation provided in Figure 1 – non ne ho voglia – does not always fit the sentences uttered by the politicians analysed. The further translation provided by Ragazzini

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2012 instead would seem to serve the purpose: non abbiamo tempo da perdere. The monolingual online dictionaries were in this respect more helpful: students found the word reference language forum very useful and fun to use, where they could also send their own questions and doubts. The paraphrase they received for the can’t be bothered structure matched indeed all the examples we found in our spoken political corpus, as Figure 3 illustrates:

Figure 3. * can’t be bothered in the word reference forum

The definition in the word reference forum was mirrored in the definition provided in the Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (2011):

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Figure 4. * can’t be bothered in the Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (2011)

The make one’s voice heard structure The structure make one’s voice heard was impossible to locate: ignored altogether in traditional grammar books, it was not even found in dictionaries. In previous research it was shown (Milizia 2012a: 123-124) that make is the third most frequent lexical verb in political speeches, preceded only by want and know: the evidence of the data shows that make almost certainly does not rank so high carrying the meaning of “create or produce something by working” (Milizia 2012b). With the exception of some verbs which make meaning also on their own, most verbs need a particle or some other word to account for such a high ranking. Biber et al. (1999: 1026) notice that the verb make, together with take and have, is particularly productive in combining with a following noun phrase to form, in many cases, idiomatic expressions. That said, it was not feasible to find make ones’ voice heard under the verb make, nor under voice (since one would probably expect to find a phrase under a noun rather than under a verb) or hear. Yet, despite the difficulties in finding this passive phrase in the dictionary, let alone grammar books, unlike the phrase analysed in 3.1, whose Italian counterpart was not easily deciphered from the context, the

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Italian equivalent of make one’s voice heard was clearly identified in concordances, as we can see in Figure 5: N 1 2 3 4 5

Concordance that is the reason why, with President Barroso, we have come to make Europe's voice heard. And next week, we will be chairing the that is the reason why, with President Barroso, we have come to make Europe's voice heard. And next week, we will be chairing the by any one individual country, and the more powerful Europe is to make its voice heard in the world, the more we have got an by any one individual country, and the more powerful Europe is to make its voice heard in the world, the more we have got an it is important for Europe to become more important in the world, to make its voice heard more, is that not inherently competitive to

6

needs to have the weight and authority to make Europe count, make its voice heard. A serious person for a serious job. Conclusion

7 8

as part of a commonwealth in which each individual group can make its voice heard. As the nation faces the increasingly complex . You know that the EU is the most effective way that Britain can make its voice heard on global issues alongside the US and the

9

level with key suppliers of energy, use our collective weight to make our voice heard; and thirdly, we need to be developing ...

10

it economically effective, not economically feeble; to use Europe to make our voice heard louder and stronger in the world. In the course

11 12

Britain is a member of this club, for goodness sake let's get in there, make our voice heard, win the battles and do so with confidence, . (Applause.) And I urge every American who wants this reform to make their voice heard as well --- every family, every business, every

13

it. I urge every citizen to participate in this important debate and to make your voice heard. Explain to your local representative or your

14

didn't vote for a dysfunctional government. So I'm asking you all to make your voice heard. If you want a balanced approach to reducing

15

its word. Now, on Monday night, I asked the American people to make their voice heard in this debate, and the response was

16

are willing to work in this last week. (Applause.) If you are willing to make your voice heard in this last week, if you're willing to knock on

17

make the difference. You could be the one who inspires someone to make their voice heard in November. That's the impact that each of

18 19

could be the one. You could be the one who inspires someone to make their voice heard next November. That is the impact that all of and with respect. And here in Washington you'll have the chance to make your voice heard on the issue of making sure that everybody,

20

us here to serve. I’m asking Americans all across the country to make your voice heard. Tell members of Congress what a $2,000

21

could be the one. You could be the one who inspires someone to make their voice heard this November. You could be the one. That is

22

, every interaction. You could be the one who inspires that person to make their voice heard this November. And that's the kind of impact

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we want to build – not just on election day, but every day. So make your voice heard. I promise, it makes a difference. Thanks, and

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drug benefit for seniors. The time for action is now. Please make your voice heard, so that we can make sure our seniors enjoy

25

every patient, every doctor, every nurse, every physician's assistant. Make your voice heard. This has been a long and wrenching debate.

Figure 5. make * voice heard in ABC

Widening the context of some of the concordances displayed in Figure 5, students managed to arrive at some possible translations: -

On Monday night, I asked the American people to make their voice heard in this debate, and the response was overwhelming. The more powerful Europe is to make its voice heard in the world, the more we have got an opportunity to deal with these issues. And that is the reason why, with President Barroso, we have come to make Europe's voice heard.

Online dictionaries, again, proved very helpful indeed. The word reference forum provided the following definitions, both literal and idiomatic: speak loudly and audibly and share your opinion. Interestingly, during their oral performance, students were able to use this construction appropriately and in the right context. The closest Italian counterpart they came up with was farsi ascoltare, dire la propria opinione: needless to say, 80% of the instances found in the corpus were

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of an idiomatic kind rather than literal, thus carrying the meaning of have a say, speak up loud.

The get things done structure The get things done structure, or the get * done structure in general, is a causative which may be indeed regarded as a fixed phrase, or a semifixed phrase, given that several collocates are allowed on the paradigmatic axis: Here below are the collocates found in our corpus, displayed in frequency order: -

get anything done get everything done get it done get more done get much done get nothing done get something done get stuff done get that done get things done get this done get work done

Unlike the two previous passive forms analysed, the get * done structure did not remain totally unexplored in grammar texts. Murphy (2011: 92) has a whole chapter for the causative have something done, and the last part of the chapter takes into account the use of get in place of have. Murphy claims that “you can also say get something done instead of have something done, mainly in informal spoken English.” That said, it appears that the only difference between the two is the level of formality, hence one would imagine finding in political speeches more examples of have something done than of get something done. Yet very few instances of the former were yielded in our spoken corpus. Vince (2005: 102)1 also has an entire chapter for the have/get something done structure, and even though the title of the chapter itself is “Have/get something done”, no example is provided with the verb done, which is indeed only used to 1 In his chapter Vince (2005) does not even make a slight distinction between have and get, thus presenting the two verbs as perfect synonyms, thus interchangeable.

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indicate that the verb should be in the past participle2 (Vince 2009: 40). The verb done was instead highly frequent in such a structure in political speeches, as Figure 5 below illustrates: N 450 451 452 453

Concordance is "it's my way or the highway," then we're probably not going to get something done because we've got divided government. We've everybody in the room is willing to do what they have to do, wants to get something done by August 2nd. But isn't the problem the people issue for them. But we're not going to delay. Our goal is to try to get something done by next year. And our hope is, is that if we can side is putting some politics aside for just a nanosecond in order to get something done for the American people, we've got to be right

454

coming off my election, I have met them at least halfway in order to get something done for the country.

455

actions we took in terms of deferred action give us the basis now to get something done for the DREAMers, to get comprehensive

456

well do it now, as opposed to trying to muster up the political will to get something done further down in the future.

457

And so I noticed that there With respect to

got the American people's thanks, because they know it is time to get something done here in Washington. (Applause.) As we meet

458

. So I remain not only open to conversations, but I remain eager to get something done. I’d like to get it done before Christmas. There’s

459

moment we're willing to set politics aside, at least briefly, in order to get something done. I don't expect politicians not to think about

460 461

a genuine desire on the part of Republicans and Democrats to try to get something done, I think there is a weariness among membership the bubble drives me crazy. So if I didn't think I was actually going to get something done, I wouldn’t have run. Nancy has gorgeous

462

able to get something done. And I promise you, it's a lot easier to get something done in the majority than in the minority. (Laughter.)

463

the balance tips, even in making compromises that are required to get something done in this town, where you are hurting people in

464 465

and specific we can get, the more quickly we might be able to get something done on this. THE PRESIDENT: The only comment I'd , right? If we start listening to each other, then we should be able to get something done that's constructive. We should be able to get

466

, and is less interested in vilifying opponents than figuring out how to get something done, then we're going to start electing folks who do

467

D.C. 7:42 P.M. EDT THE PRESIDENT: So, first of all, if you want to get something done, you put a woman in charge -- (laughter) -- of the

468

do for oil companies and rich folks. Pass this bill. (Applause.) Let's get something done. (Applause.) The next election is 14 months

469 470

: Send me the American Jobs Act so I can sign it into law. Let's get something done. Let's put this country back to work. Thank you , to make our country stronger in the long run, to prove that we can get something done here in Washington -- this fight could not be

471

for folks at the top 2 percent. But I do remain optimistic that we can get something done that is good for families like this one’s and that

472

know what, this is something that we need to do, to compromise and get something done. And I've got to tell you I could not be prouder of

473

conversation about, all right, where can we compromise and get something done. And I'm confident that will be the spirit that

474

.com today. And sign up to get involved. Roll up your sleeves and get something done. (Applause.) And you all know that this election

475

for us to set aside some of the gamesmanship in this town and get something done. (Applause.) Now, I believe -- I just want to repeat

Figure 5. get something done in ABC

In his Advanced Grammar in Use, Hewings (2002: 82) provides a clearcut distinction between have and get in the structure, claiming that when the verb have is used the person referred to in the subject of the sentence is not responsible for or has no control over what happens, whereas when the verb get is used the person referred to in the subject of the sentence causes what happens, perhaps accidentally, or is to blame for it. Yet this distinction does not seem to apply to the speeches of the politicians investigated: the have something done structure was indeed never found, and the negative connotation that the verb get seems to carry with it in passive forms does not appear to hold. Also the further distinction provided by Hewings (ibid.) that “we prefer have if we want to focus on the result of the action rather than the action itself” does not seem to apply to spoken politics. Indeed, as mentioned at the beginning, it seems clear from the examples above that the structure get something done is to be regarded as 2 The examples provided are in fact of the I’ve just had/got my car serviced type, or I’ve just had my hair cut (got is not possible in this type of sentence).

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a semi-fixed phrase, whose rendering in Italian can be disambiguated only when contextualized. Let us analyse some sentences taken from the concordance lines in Figure 5: -

-

So, first of all, if you want to get something done, you put a woman in charge -- (laughter) -- of the DNC. And sign up to get involved. Roll up your sleeves and get something done. (Applause.) And you all know that this election is about those battleground states. I mean, if the basic proposition is “it's my way or the highway” then we’re probably not going to get something done because we’ve got divided government.

From the concordances displayed, which were chosen randomly, it can certainly be borne out that the tone of the speaker is fairly informal. Needless to say, the translation of the expression was impossible to find; online dictionaries and forums again provided the best aid, as the following figure shows:

Figure 6. get something done in ABC

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The translation provided by the bab.la dictionary online proved fitting and reliable: concludere. In some examples students suggested that riuscire a concludere was probably more overarching and complete, as well as raggiungere risultati, raggiungere l’obiettivo prefissato. It is worth adding that students were bemused when they discovered that these structures are more often than not inadequately described in reference materials, that others receive scant attention, and others still remain totally unexplored. The spoken political corpus assembled was thus seen as a vital resource in throwing light upon such features. Mauranen’s (2004) assumption according to which spoken language is a domain where learners need to work out many linguistic features on their own because they cannot expect enough help from textbooks or reference materials is here further corroborated.

The be-, get- and become- passive When talking of the passive voice, Leech et al. (2012: 144) list three types of passives: the central be-passive, the get-passive, and ‘middles’ or ‘mediopassive constructions’. They also briefly touch upon the passival3 in instances like The music is playing softly in the background. Mainly for reasons of time, we did not cover the passival in class, nor the mediopassive, even though we did find quite a few occurrences which aroused the interest of some students, like There’s the belief that healthy food doesn’t sell well, or You know, their economic theory doesn’t sell well. We did not deal with the get-passive in great detail, but some instances were serendipitously yielded when investigating political phrasal verbs, in particular sworn in, in instances like The month I got sworn in, in January, Americans lost 750,000 jobs. The get-passive is a relatively recent innovation in English, and, not surprisingly, is restricted primarily to conversation and informal spoken contexts (McCarthy 2006: 34). It has been noted that most of the verbs that are moderately common with the get-passive have negative connotations, conveying the idea that the action of the verb is difficult, or unfortunate, or to the disadvantage of the subject, indicating that “something unpleasant is happening” (Francis et al. 1996: 58-59). As Stubbs (2001: 212) points out, there is consensus that the be-passive is usually more neutral in meaning, whereas the get-passive more often expresses emotive or interpersonal 3

The passive is the active progressive use of a verb with passive meaning (Leech et al. ibid.).

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meanings. In our data this remained almost unattested: with the exception of one occurrence of I got diagnosed with a treatable cancer and eight occurrences of I got discouraged, we mainly found instances with neutral semantics like I got involved in politics, I got elected and I got sworn in, where no “adversative” context (Chappell 1980) or undesirable or problematic state of affairs was meant in the get construction.4 It has been observed (Biber et al. 1999: 477) that become and get5 convey a more dynamic sense than be-passives, describing not a state but the process of getting into a state. Unsurprisingly, I got sworn in was the most common in terms of frequency in the political corpus. The students were puzzled by the fact that swear in is used almost exclusively in the passive voice and that no guidance is given in dictionaries or grammar books in this respect: in Ragazzini (2012) only one example with its relative translation is provided, without any hint of the colligational and semantic preference of the verb (see Hoey 2005). The Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (2011) provides more information, indicating that the verb is usually used in the passive, as Figure 8 shows.

4 Five occurrences of I got married were found in the spoken corpus, and although all students were familiar with both get married and get divorced, they were surprised to find out that these two verbs behave like passive verbs in English even though they are not passive in meaning. The same applies to verbs like get dressed, get tired, get lost, and get changed, which in Italian are indeed regarded as reflexive verbs. 5 In their research Biber et al. (2002: 171) have found out that the verbs which have a notable frequency with the get-passive are five: get married (over 20 per million words) and get hit, get involved, get left, and get stuck (over 5 per million words).

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Figure 7. swear in in Ragazzini (2012)

Figure 8. swear in in the Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (2011)

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Obviously, the situation is further complicated by the fact that, if we rely on the translation given in Figure 7, i.e. giurare assumendo alto ufficio, Italian uses the active voice instead, unless we opt for the verb elect, in concordance lines such as La scorsa settimana, quando è stato eletto Obama, lei era a Mosca or Bettino Craxi fu eletto al Parlamento europeo. For this purpose, the Italian corpus was looked at, to understand how often and to what extent the passive voice is used in Italian in general, and more specifically to see which verb is the “favourite choice” for the construction of the passive. Italian relies on two verbs rather than three, essere/be and venire/become, and whereas become is the most rare in English – be being the most recurrent followed by get – it came as a big surprise to find out that the verb venire is the most common in terms of frequency to form the passive voice. Figures 9 and 10 below clearly show this tendency: N 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Concordance Set kid. I got elected. Before I was eligible to serve, I had to literally wait to be sworn in because I wasn’t eligible under the Constitution. You must be 30 a tale of perseverance and triumph. On the day this good man was to be sworn in as a justice on our Supreme Court, he was driving to the White a humbling experience obviously to be elected to national office and then be sworn in on -- to that office on the steps of the Capitol. But I still remember people and hear people and be a part of this deliberation. And he will not be sworn in until next Monday. I also -- one of the interesting things about this -- if the supreme court needs to validate his election victory, then he can be sworn in -- what's the difference between what I described and what you as Jacques Chirac. People may not remember, but even before I became sworn in as President, in between the election, when it finally ended and my this summer. And we want to be a part of any solutions. Since I became sworn-in, we've been working with the state of California to provide leaders in Austin, Texas -- this is before I began heading north to become sworn-in as your President -- and there was deep concern about the I hosted a group of business leaders to Austin, Texas, before I had become sworn in as the President. And leaders all around the country came and . I'll never forget that in the height of this recession, when we had just been sworn in -- you remember. There's some selective memory going on out I will later on. But I have said during the campaign, I have said since I've been sworn in, it's important for us to do a top to bottom review, to review all has been on the -- we've been thinking about Africa ever since I've been sworn-in. Secondly, the initiatives I've laid out are bold initiatives. The have yet to work with him, obviously, President-to-President. He hasn't been sworn in. So check back in with me after I've had a couple of meetings with about it in the days after I was elected. I talked about it after I had been sworn in. We had an emergency situation on our hands, and so the entire how hard the path was going to be at the time. It was only after I had been sworn in that we realized that in fact we had lost 4 million jobs in the six about it in the days after I was elected. I talked about it after I had been sworn in. We had an emergency situation on our hands, and so the entire when President Bush and I took office January 20, 2001. As we were being sworn in that day, planning for the attack of 9/11 was already well underway. office, that December we had lost 650,000 jobs. January, as we were being sworn in, we lost 700,000 jobs; February, 650,000 jobs. So before we could President Bush and I assumed office in January of 2001. As we were being sworn in that day, planning for 9/11 was already well underway. In 1996, before I was sworn in, in this recession -- 750,000 the month I was being sworn in. And on top of that, the middle class has been struggling for more of our nation, I have traveled well over a half a million miles since being sworn in as Vice President, many of them to far-flung countries all around the : I love you back. (Applause.) Now, last week, I had the honor of being sworn in for a second term as President of the United States. (Applause.) recruits like the ones in Columbus, Ohio, who were told that instead of being sworn in as officers, they were about to be let go. It includes help for those of 2009, we had lost 4 million jobs in the six months that preceded me being sworn in, 750,000 the month that I was sworn in, 600,000 the month after that, . He was confirmed unanimously by the United States Senate. Hank is being sworn in in an optimistic time for our country and for our workers. In the first in from the outside. During the interim period between the election and being sworn in, there was discussion by some very serious economists about a

Figure 9. Concordance lines of be- and become- passive

Trusting the text, we noticed that become sworn in occurred on four occasions only, whereas in the Italian corpus the verb venire was used more frequently in the passive than in the active voice. As is shown in Figure 10, of the 25 concordance lines displayed, chosen at random, only four were used in the active voice, i.e. line 29, and lines 33-35; in the remaining 21 lines the verb has a passive usage.

The Passive Voice in Political Speeches: A Corpus-driven Study N 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

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Concordance Cina come mercato; sono tantissime, invece, le piccole e microimprese che vengono schiacciate della sleale concorrenza cinese. D'altra parte, la di calcolo dell’indicatore della situazione economica equivalente (ISEE) vengono riviste in modo da rafforzare la rilevanza degli elementi di ricchezza o i nostri programmi. Questo è possibile. Io, per esempio, che normalmente vengo ritenuto un comunicatore efficace, in quest’anno ormai alle spalle non attuata una drastica riduzione del numero dei consiglieri. Gli organi previsti vengono riportati al ruolo di Governo intermedio con funzioni di servizio e sulle ristrutturazioni di immobili e gli impianti per il risparmio energetico vengono rifinanziate e rese durature. • Tali incentivi vengono estesi agli concessioni e i contratti per Enel.. Tutti successi che a questo governo non vengono riconosciuti, come la recente assegnazione a Impregilo del concessioni e i contratti per Enel.. Tutti successi che a questo governo non vengono riconosciuti, come la recente assegnazione a Impregilo del che si sono succeduti nel corso del drammatico dopoguerra e che ora vengono riconosciuti anche dai principali protagonisti. Noi vogliamo dello sviluppo attraverso politiche per l’ambiente non è semplice. Spesso vengono richiesti ingenti investimenti da fare subito, con ritorni non democratico, in una fase nella quale cresce la competizione mondiale e vengono richieste ai singoli Paesi decisioni più veloci e incisive. Forse i cittadini italiani di 11 mila dipendenti, di qualunque regione essi siano, che vengono retribuiti per dei lavori fittizi. Ritengo che ciò rappresenti un aspetto non tanto per orgoglio localistico, ma perché da questa condizione vengono responsabilità più grandi per i processi sociali e di sviluppo delle alle famiglie, con la cosiddetta “clausola di salvaguardia”. I risparmi previsti vengono resi certi con l’aumento dell’IVA, ma tale aggravio delle imposte registrato nel paese negli ultimi anni La maggior parte delle risorse vengono reperite tramite un intervento deciso nella lotta all’evasione e il fatto che ogni qualvolta le cooperative danno vita a società per azioni che vengono quotate in Borsa, normalmente ottengono un grande successo. Nel Un cittadino adulto che non deve vivere nell'incubo dell'abbandono. A Napoli vengo quindi a chiedere e offrire collaborazione per promuovere insieme un più elevata della regione. E una delle prime cinque in Italia. Persone che vengono qui per lavorare e aiutarci a crescere. Certo, talvolta l’integrazione e tradimento, laddove la missione storica è combattere l’altro con cui loro vengono qui a convivere e questo da anche l’idea della grandezza della sarà costretto a scoprire il bluff. Lei pensa davvero, con le difficoltà che le vengono prospettate, di poter continuare, l'anno prossimo, a destinare europeo, ascoltiamo altri Governi obiettare a proposte o iniziative che vengono presentate, che - esse sì - sono in via di principio interessanti e di avere le ricette e le chiavi per risolvere i problemi che alla politica vengono posti. Essi devono essere animati costantemente da questo il diritto d’asilo. E teniamo le porte chiuse per le grandi moltitudini che vengono portate qui, molte in condizioni di schiavitù e attraverso delle il diritto d’asilo. E teniamo le porte chiuse per le grandi moltitudini che vengono portate qui, molte in condizioni di schiavitù e attraverso delle per prima cosa voglio dire che io seguo con profondo rispetto le azioni che vengono portate avanti dal mio collega Mario Monti e dal suo governo, . Pertanto, non vi è alcuna segretezza su tali controlli, ma anzi essi vengono per legge resi noti attraverso un sistema che li rende accessibili a stanno manifestando. Mi riferisco, ad esempio, al fatto che i pensionati vengono pagati per scendere in piazza. Ho visto, in alcune televisioni locali,

Figure 10. Concordance lines of vengo/vengono in Italian

Interestingly, the verb venire in the third person singular, viene, was used always in the passive, as shown in Figure 11: N 6 7 8

Concordance correnti, sui quali continua ad essere applicato un bollo in cifra fissa, che anzi viene cancellato per i conti correnti inferiori ai 5000 euro . Si è molto discusso approfondite. Sviluppo della società della conoscenza Sull’argomento, viene sottolineato il basso livello di spesa in Ricerca e Sviluppo che ancora lungamente meritata. Un prestigio che nasce da un duro lavoro e qui ad Astana viene oggi consacrato e riconosciuto da tutti: frutto dell’intelligenza politica di un

9

e “il domicilio è inviolabile”. Con l’abuso delle intercettazioni, la nostra Carta viene violata in modo plateale. Tuttavia la sinistra, che si riempie sempre la bocca

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e “il domicilio è inviolabile”. Con l’abuso delle intercettazioni, la nostra Carta viene violata in modo plateale. Tuttavia la sinistra, che si riempie sempre la bocca

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e tecnici specializzati, domanda che nella stragrande maggioranza dei casi viene soddisfatta da lavoratori stranieri che appositamente vengono in Italia,

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e tecnici specializzati, domanda che nella stragrande maggioranza dei casi viene soddisfatta da lavoratori stranieri che appositamente vengono in Italia,

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, questo casomai è il diritto alla riservatezza di ogni cittadino. Riservatezza che viene violata si-sternaticarnènte dalla stampa di sinistra [...], , Lei vuole che si

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, questo casomai è il diritto alla riservatezza di ogni cittadino. Riservatezza che viene violata si-sternaticarnènte dalla stampa di sinistra [...], , Lei vuole che si

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e la posizione cosiddetta di equivicinanza «Equivicinanza è una brutta parola, che viene usata in senso spregiativo. Il concetto è più alto: essere egualmente amici

16 17 18 19 20 21

. E lui: "Mi oppongo perché sono dell'opposizione". Quindi questa è la regola che viene seguita dall'opposizione con cui dobbiamo fare i conti oggi. Non facemmo le parole precise che hanno segnato un episodio. Ed ecco che l’episodio che viene raccontato – credo che questa sia una volontà precisa – senza lasciare nostre attività, come succede per qualunque iniziativa intrapresa dal Governo, che viene puntualmente criticata come se fosse foriera di grandi mali per i cittadini e stato e lo sono anche adesso – ed è totale la mia distanza rispetto a quello che viene prodotto nelle televisioni di casa. GIUSEPPE TITO, ANSA. Signor nostra nazione, un ritorno alla tradizione di libertà. E la libertà è un diritto che viene prima delle leggi e dello Stato, perché è un diritto naturale che ci appartiene nostra nazione, un ritorno alla tradizione di libertà. E la libertà è un diritto che viene prima delle leggi e dello Stato, perché è un diritto naturale che ci appartiene

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che vengono assunti su base molto temporanea senza alcuna protezione e che viene più colpito nella crisi”. Per questo, secondo il Presidente della BCE, è

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. L’agenda italiana è quella europea. Non c’è distinzione o tensione tra ciò che viene perseguito qui a Roma e ciò che stiamo perseguendo noi a Bruxelles.

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ai precedenti tre mesi. Accanto a ciò, la batteria degli indicatori congiunturali che viene normalmente monitorata per studiare gli andamenti di breve periodo

Figure 11. Concordance lines of viene in Italian

The use of corpus evidence was particularly helpful in this respect, and it was interesting to note that Italian students themselves were surprised to discover that the verb venire was so frequent in the passive voice. These findings were further evidence that corpus data are much more reliable than invented examples in terms of authenticity.

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Voice and aspect combinations As mentioned at the beginning of the paper, some passive structures are regarded as a stumbling block for students, mainly those where a straightforward equivalent is missing in Italian. The passive of the Big progress is being made type is without doubt the most tricky for Italian students, that is, when the English verb is marked for combination of aspect and voice, namely when progressive aspect co-occurs with the passive voice. The progressive passive is usually not dealt with in schools or in universities. Even though some books briefly cover the structure, it is generally inadequately described in pedagogical grammars. In the examples provided by Hewings (2010: 48), we simply read that “in more formal contexts, particularly writing, we often prefer to use a passive so that we can avoid any mention of an agent”, thus a sentence like The new computer system is being installed next month would be preferable to They’re installing the new computer system next month. Along the same lines, when introducing the passive without an agent, Carter et al. (2011: 366) report the sentence I walked to work, the car’s being repaired. Murphy (2011: 86), when dealing with the present and past continuous, reports three examples: -

I think we’re being followed No thank you, I’m being served The room was being cleaned when I arrived

But he fails to clearly make any reference to the combination of aspect and voice, something which is totally missing in Italian. It was noticed that if grammar books such as Collins Cobuild (2004), Carter et al. (2011), Murphy (2011), and Hewings (2010) only briefly cover the passive progressive, English texts for Italian students ignore the structure altogether. The survey I carried out in class showed that, out of my 550 students, two thirds had never encountered such a structure. The remaining one third said that they had, but had never stopped to think about it, very likely confusing it with the closest structure they are familiar with in Italian, namely the one where perfect aspect combines with the passive: thus, all these innocent people are being killed and the country is being destroyed was mistakenly interpreted as all these innocent people have been killed and the country has been destroyed, or Big progress is being made in Iraq was mistakenly interpreted as Big progress has been made in Iraq. In this

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respect, we cannot but agree with Berry (1999) when he claims that “Traditional grammar texts get things wrong, or drastically leave some common patterns unaccounted for.” In their groundbreaking grammar based entirely on authentic language, Biber et al. (1999) maintain that today voice and aspect combinations are possible but, in actual usage, the perfect passive is only moderately common, while the progressive passive is rare. Yet many instances were found in our spoken political corpus of both the This progress has been achieved under some extremely challenging circumstances type and the Power is being wielded in different places and in different ways type. It emerged in the survey that matters are further complicated by the fact that progressive aspect, also referred to as continuous aspect, is generally underused by Italian students. It has been pointed out that the progressive is more frequent in the spoken than in the written mode, and this may also be one of the reasons why it is under-taught, given that traditional books base their examples more on the written than on the spoken register. It is worth noting that most of the students that took part in the survey said that they could not use the present continuous with some verbs in particular. The verb be, for instance, is hardly used in Italian in the progressive, and as a result utterances like We hope that this is being a productive session, or The state is being a bad parent and our children effectively are ending up in prison, or My hon. Friend is being a bit charitable are perceived as cumbersome by an Italian speaker. Furthermore, it came as a surprise to find out that the present perfect continuous which, on the contrary, is dealt with in all grammar books and usually covered in great detail by high schools teachers, also emerged as an issue, in utterances like And that is what my husband has been doing every single day as President of the United States or I’m glad that my hon. Friend has been travelling and seeing the world. It emerged that students could use the present perfect continuous if and only if since or for followed in the near distance, in instances like This issue has been going on for two, two and a half years or Detroit Diesel has been turning out some of the best engines in the world since 1938. However, a manual analysis has shown that the utterances of sentences with the present perfect continuous without since and for outweigh those where the two prepositions are to be found. Needless to say, we did not even touch upon instances like The idea has been getting battered a little bit over the last decade, which was nevertheless encountered and questioned by some of the keener students.

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Packing and repacking of the sentence? How to keep the progressive going in Italian As Denison (1998: 152f) points out, the progressive passive is of very recent vintage, dating back to the second half of the 18th century. In Smitterberg et al.’s (2000) diachronic study on the present progressive in political and academic language in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was observed that, during the 19th century, the new type of progressive passive, as in The house is being built, largely ousted the older construction with active form and passive meaning, as in The house is building (Denison 1998). There was plenty of negative prescriptive reaction to the new pattern. Visser (1973) claims that this type originated in spoken language and that educated people who initially used the new structure did so only in familiar or unceremonious conversation with their intimate friends and the members of their family, and that writers did not dare to employ it. Moreover, Denison (1998) suggests that “most early examples tend to come from the pens of young people writing informally.” However, all examples of the type The house is being built date from the latter half of the 19th century; it is therefore possible that the influence from the Southey/Coleridge circle had had time to contribute to the spread of the new progressive passive. As Smitterberg et al. aptly observe in their research where translation from English into German is involved, a strategy of addition is needed also when it comes to translating from English into Italian: the Italian text, in fact, in order to keep the progressive and the passive at the same time, has to recur to an adverbial of the still type (or always, ever, constantly, all the time). The proportion of adverbials in Italian translations of the English progressive is higher than the proportion in the original texts. Italian needs adverbials to express aspectual meaning since there is no way of indicating aspect of the verb in Italian. Thus, if we decide to switch from the present continuous to the present simple and keep the impersonal form, we need to add adverbials in order to convey the progressive. Adverbs expressing time references are the most frequent type of adverbial modification, and apart from the stereotypical now, there is a very wide variety of adverbial modification, ranging from words like still to phrases like at this time to when- or while-clauses (Smitterberg et al. 2000). Let us consider, for example, sentences like the following: -

The Ethiopian Foreign Minister has said that the hostages are safe and well, but they are being held by unknown kidnappers

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They are absolutely committed to trying to help those innocent civilians who are being killed by the Assad regime You can go online and see how this money is being spent and what kind of jobs are being created, and where these jobs are being created

In these examples, the first two display a long passive with the agent clearly expressed, by unknown kidnappers and by the Assad regime; the third has a short passive, with an unspecified someone. It has been observed (Biber et al. 2002: 167) that short passives are about six times as frequent as long passives, and this statistic is corroborated in the present research. The agent is generally omitted when redundant or unimportant; in the case in question the agent is unspecified because it is easy to infer. As mentioned earlier, in the translation process from English into Italian, one of the two forms has to be sacrificed, either the passive voice or the progressive aspect. It was thus agreed in class that, in order to remain as faithful as possible to the source text and to keep the progressive going, the addition of some time adverbials like still, at this time, still today, to date or any other adverbial that conveys the idea that the event is currently or still in progress was needed. Here below are the translations suggested by the students: -

Il Ministro degli Esteri etiope ha detto che gli ostaggi stanno bene ma che sono ancora nelle mani di rapitori ignoti Sono completamente impegnati nel cercare di aiutare quei civili innocenti che ancora oggi vengono uccisi dal regime di Assad Potete andare online e vedere come si stanno spendendo questi soldi e che tipo di lavori stiamo creando e dove li stiamo creando

It is clear that some repacking of the utterances was required: are being held in the first sentence underwent some change and the phrase are still in the hands of was preferred to the verb. The idea of the progressive in the second sentence was kept by adding still today, thereby indicating that the event is currently in progress, and this would have not been so obvious had we relied on the present simple without the time adverbial. Several choices could have been made in the third example: the two progressives, is being spent and are being created were rendered respectively with the impersonal form si and with the active form, we are creating. It seemed to us that American President Barack Obama here deliberately chose to repeat are being created, to convey the idea that every dime is being spent wisely and that he, as President, is involved in the good spending of the

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money, hence an inclusive we active was favoured. The choice of the active would have been appropriate also for money is being spent, relying on we again or also on they, e.g. stiamo spendendo, stanno spendendo. Italian being a pro-drop language (Meyer 2002: 3), even when in sentences like stanno spendendo the active is used, the impersonality and the avoidance of responsibility that the passive conveys is kept, in that the logical subject remains unexpressed and discourse is still depersonalized (Milizia 2012a: 65). A further alternative could have been the specification of the subject, when known or obvious, or when deducible from the enlarged context, i.e. il Governo/the Government, lo Stato/the State (Milizia ibid.).

Conclusion Though no longer in its infancy and almost 30 years old, Corpus Linguistics is still a minority sport in the teaching and learning of language, particularly in non-language faculties (Milizia 2013). Corpora seem to have entered the classroom from the back door: the gap between corpora and teaching reality is still far too wide, and the extent to which corpora and concordances are being used in the classroom is as yet fairly limited (Römer 2008: 123). This is even more true for spoken corpora, and despite the ideological lip-service paid to the priority of speech (Mauranen 2004b), spoken corpora have made little headway into teaching so far. In this paper I have attempted to show that natural language should form the basis of our teaching rather than invented and contrived examples, which very often provide bland and unconvincing examples. I aimed at corroborating Sinclair’s (1991) assumption that “it is an absurd notion that invented examples can actually represent the language better than real ones” – we cannot trust our ability to make up examples, and this practice would also be “just nonsense” from a semantic point of view (Firth 1957: 24) – as well as Kennedy’s (1992: 366) warning that “invented examples can present a distorted version of typicality or an over-tidy picture of the system” (see also Milizia 2012a, 2012b, 2013). As we have seen in this chapter with regard to the use of the passive voice, what we tend to find in traditional grammar books is a simplified, incomplete, and often non-authentic English (Römer ibid.; Milizia 2012a). I have shown that even though the passive voice is copiously illustrated in all traditional reference texts, many of its variants, e.g. can’t be bothered, make one’s voice heard, get things done, remain largely unexplored, and we had to consult several different resources to try and arrive at some possible Italian counterparts. I have also shown that other

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uses of the passive voice, like the passive progressive, that is, when the verb is marked for combination of aspect and voice, are given little emphasis or ignored altogether. Starting from the assumption that frequency is a crucial criterion, students were disconcerted on discovering that the structures we investigated in class received scant attention in reference texts. It was obvious, at this point, that highly frequent passives like Violence is being replaced by progress were misinterpreted and mistaken with Violence has been replaced by progress: the perfect passive is in fact generally covered in grammar books (it also happens to have a perfect match in Italian), whereas the progressive passive is usually overlooked (and in Italian is missing altogether). We cannot but agree with Berry (1999: 39) when he claims that “it is easy to get things wrong when the right ones are not available”.

References Barber C.L. 1985. Some measurable characteristics of scientific prose. In J. Swales (ed.) Episodes in ESP. Oxford: Pergamon: 3-14. Berry R. 1999. The seven sins of pedagogic grammar. In R. Berry / B. Asker / K. Hyland / M. Lam (eds.), Language Analysis, Descriptions and Pedagogy. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University: 29-40. Biber D. / S. Johansson / S. Conrad / E. Finegan / G. Leech 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Biber D. / S. Conrad / G. Leech 2002. The Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman. Carter R. / M. McCarthy / G. Mark / A. O’Keeffe 2011. English Grammar Today, An A-Z of Spoken and Written Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins Cobuild English Grammar 2004. Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers. Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary 2011. London: Collins. Collins Desktop 2005. Dizionario inglese-italiano, italiano-inglese. Milano: Boroli Editore. Chappell H. 1980. Is the get-passive adversative? Papers in Linguistics 13: 411-452. Chomsky N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. Denison D. 1998. Syntax. In S. Romaine (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume IV: 1776–1997. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 92-329.

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Firth J.R. 1957. A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930-1955. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis, 1-32 reprinted in F. Palmer (ed.), Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952-59. London: Longman. Francis G. / S. Hunston / E. Manning 1996. Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs. London: HarperCollins. Halliday M.A.K. 2002. The spoken language corpus: a foundation for grammatical theory. In K. Aijner / B. Alternberg (eds), Proceedings of ICAME 2002, The Theory and Use of Corpora, Goteborg 22-26 May 2002. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hewings M. 2002. Advanced Grammar in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoey M. 2005. Lexical Priming. A New Theory of Words and Language. London: Routledge. Kennedy G. 1992. Preferred ways of putting things with implications for language teaching. In J. Svartvik (ed.), Directions in Corpus Linguistics: Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium 82 Stockholm, 4-8 August 1991. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 335-373. Leech G. / M. Hundt / C. Mair / N. Smith 2012. Change in Contemporary English. A Grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy R. 2011. English Grammar in Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mauranen A. 2004a. Speech corpora in the classroom. In G. Aston / D. Stewart / S. Bernardini (eds), Corpora and Language Learner. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 195-211. Mauranen A. 2004b. Spoken corpora for an ordinary learner. In J. Sinclair (ed.), How to Use Corpora in Language Teaching. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 89-105. McCarthy M. 2006. Explorations in Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer C. 2002. English Corpus Linguistics. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milizia D. 2012a. Phraseology in Political Discourse. A Corpus Linguistics Approach in the Classroom. Milano: LED. —. 2012b. Spoken corpora in the classroom. In Regenerating Community, Territory, Voices. Memory and Vision, Proceedings of the XXV AIA Conference, L’Aquila, September 15-17, 2011, Volume II: 96-108. —. 2013. Phrasal verbs and phrasal units: political corpora within the walls of the classroom. In D. Heller / C. Desoutter / M. Sala (eds), Corpora in Specialized Communication. Bergamo: CERLIS Series, CELSB: 135-164.

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Murphy R. 2011. English Grammar in Use 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nesselhauf N. 2004. How learner corpus analysis can contribute to language teaching: a study of support verb constructions. In G. Aston / D. Stewart / S. Bernardini (eds.), Corpora and Language Learners. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 151-168. Orwell G. 1946. Politics and the English Language. Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art. Ragazzini 2004. Dizionario Inglese-Italiano, Italian-English dictionary DVD, Zanichelli. —. 2012. Dizionario Inglese-Italiano, Italian-English dictionary DVD, Zanichelli. Römer U. 2004. Comparing real and ideal language learner input: the use of an EFL textbook corpus in corpus linguistics and language teaching. In G. Aston / D. Stewart / S. Bernardini (eds), Corpora and Language Learners. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 109-124. Scarpa F. 2001. La Traduzione Specializzata. Milano: Hoepli. Sinclair J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2002. Review of The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 6/2: 339-359. —. 2008. The phrase, the whole phrase, and nothing but the phrase. In S. Granger / F. Meunier (eds), Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins: 407-410. Smitterberg E. / S. Reich / A. Hahn 2000. The present progressive in political and academic language in the 19th and 20th centuries: a corpus-based investigation. ICAME Journal 24: 99-118. Strunk W. 1918. The Elements of Style. New York: Harcourt. Tognini Bonelli E. 2001. Corpus Linguistics at Work. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vince M. 2005. Inside Grammar. Oxford: Macmillan. —. 2009. Advanced Language Practice. English Grammar and Vocabulary, 3rd edition. Oxford: Macmillan. Visser F. 1973. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Williams C. 2004. Pragmatic and cross-cultural considerations in translating verbal constructions in prescriptive legal texts in English and Italian. Intercultural Discourse in Domain-specific English, TEXTUS XVII/1: 217-245.

CHAPTER TWELVE ASSESSING THE LANGUAGE SKILLS OF LEGAL ENGLISH LEARNERS THROUGH INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL TESTING: THE EXPERIENCE OF EFLIT CANDIDATES ANILA R. SCOTT-MONKHOUSE UNIVERSITY OF PARMA, ITALY

Introduction In 2006 the Faculty of Law of the University of Parma (Italy) launched a postgraduate training project called EFLIT (English for Law and International Transactions) with the aim of offering professionals and graduates in the fields of Law and Economics a course combining a linguistic focus (i.e. English for Law, at B2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference) and a content focus (i.e. Law in English) in order to improve both their language and legal skills. Thanks to its unique format, EFLIT has since then developed from a local project to a national project and has obtained the official recognition of professional associations of both lawyers and chartered accountants for accreditation purposes in continuous education. This has called for a valid, reliable, standardised end-of-course test which assesses the level reached by participants and is “authentic”, i.e. reflects their real needs for English and translates their competence into actual performance. From the start participants have been encouraged to aim for the International Legal English Certificate (ILEC) by Cambridge English Language Assessment. However, only very few have attempted ILEC pre-testing and even fewer have actually taken the exam. The main reason is that the level required by ILEC (i.e. B2/C1 of the CEFR) is generally too high for the people on the EFLIT courses, giving rise to candidates’ frustration and discouragement. This study illustrates the content and format of both the in-house final

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exam and ILEC, compares the results obtained by candidates, and attempts to investigate the reasons underlying the mismatch also by taking into consideration less obvious factors such as the professional context, candidates’ requirements and expectations, and previous exam experiences.

The EFLIT project In 2006 the Faculty of Law of Parma University launched EFLIT (English for Law and International Transactions),1 a postgraduate training project devised and coordinated by professors Alberto Cadoppi and Stefano Maffei. The aim of the project is to offer professionals and graduates in the fields of Law, Economics and Political Sciences a course with an innovative interactive format combining a focus on both language (i.e. English for Law, at B2 level of the Common European Framework of Reference 2 ) and content (i.e. Law in English), with a “learn-by-doing” methodology (Task-Based Learning) (Willis 1996). Since then EFLIT has developed into a national project comprising two different types of courses (i.e. a full programme, covering 80 hours in 4 months, and a short programme consisting of 18 hours divided into 6 seminars), and now boasts advanced sessions, an active mailing list for EFLIT alumni, and an updated Facebook group page. 3 It also offers internships at EPLO (European Public Law Organisation in Athens, Greece),4 consultancy and assistance to graduates seeking admission to LLM Masters’ programmes abroad, and study visits to the Temple University Beasley School of Law (Philadelphia, USA) and Worcester College in Oxford (UK) within the “International Legal Practice” programme by ECCLE (European Centre for Continuing Legal Education).5 Finally, it hosts professors and interns from US Law Schools within the Advanced Seminar on Current Developments in European Law which takes place in Parma every year in June. All EFLIT programmes have been recognised by professional associations for accreditation purposes in the continuous education of Italian lawyers and chartered accountants. Indeed, the training is designed for professionals and experts in the fields of law (lawyers, notaries, judges, 1

http://www.englishforlaw.it/. Cf. Council of Europe, The Common European Framework of Reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment. http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/ Source/Framework_EN.pdf. 3 https://www.facebook.com/#!/EFLIT?bookmark_t=page. 4 http://www.eplo.eu/. 5 www.eccle.eu. 2

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prosecutors, in-house counsels, trainees, paralegals, and PhD students), and of business and finance (chartered accountants, tax advisors, financial consultants). EFLIT is held in partnership with the local Bar Associations, academic institutions (including Translegal6 and ECCLE), major law firms (among which Baker & McKenzie, Clifford Chance, and Cleary Gottlieb Steen and Hamilton LLP, Milan), and associations of legal and business professionals (e.g. AIGA, the Italian Association for Young Lawyers7). Sessions are taught in English and materials include authentic professional documents, both adapted and unabridged, such as contracts, articles of incorporation, balance sheets, and memos. The staff is made up of university lecturers, linguists, visiting professors, 8 professionals with international experience and guest speakers.9 The present study concentrates on the EFLIT full course, which awards participants an official university certificate on passing an end-of-course exam, and consists of four modules covering 80 hours of training: a) English for Law (with materials largely based on ILEC10 taught by a linguist working on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and using a published textbook as support), b) Law and Business classes (led by scholars, experts in the fields, university lecturers etc., and including topics such as professional correspondence, contracts, corporate law, alternative dispute resolution and litigation, financial statements analysis, real estate, ethics and professional conduct), c) mini-group workshop sessions focusing on specific topics, d) e-learning via the PLEAD platform11 designed by Translegal. The course in itself is just a “stepping stone” towards developing greater autonomy and building confidence so that participants can actually 6

Translegal is Europe’s leading firm of lawyer-linguists (www.translegal.com). Associazione Italiana Giovani Avvocati (http://www.aiga.it/). 8 David Sohenshein from the Temple University Beasley School of Law (Philadelphia, USA) is a regular visitor. 9 Beatrice Collier, barrister at Middle Temple (London) is a regular visitor, and the British Consul in Milan and the general counsel of the European Food Safety Authority EFSA (http://www.efsa.europa.eu/) were invited speakers in the 2010-11 edition. 10 ILEC (International Legal English Certificate) is an examination produced and assessed by the English Language Assessment Examinations board of Cambridge University in collaboration with Translegal (http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/ exams-and-qualifications/legal/). 11 http://www.translegal.com/plead. 7

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follow developments and operate effectively and independently in their field. The objective is to help them overcome the restricted competence of only being able to do what has specifically been practised in class as the risk in any ESP course, where class-time is limited, is to become too narrowly focused on teaching fixed phrases, expressions and behaviours, rather than strategies enabling learners to adapt to new situations (Widdowson 1983). However, participants need to become professionals able to use English confidently and manage in less predictable situations in the real world, and given the limited time busy professionals can devote to English outside the classroom, it is essential to add an element of learner training (i.e. becoming aware of what being a (language) learner actually means and developing skills in “learning how to learn”) in a perspective of lifelong learning (Nunan 1988). A careful explanation of what is being done (including the “how” and “why”) helps develop the learners’ confidence and equips them with the necessary tools to continue working alone (Willis 1996). In other words, the aim is to heighten their consciousness of the learning process itself and encourage reflection so that they are sensitized to the process (Little 2000), become able to transfer skills to non-prespecified situations, acquire coping skills, and are consequently empowered.12

Assessing the language skills of learners of Legal English The EFLIT end-of-course exam The EFLIT full programme reaches its completion with a final exam. As Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998: 210) put it: The reasons for assessment can be grouped under two main headings: for feedback to aid learning and for a comparable measure of competence. […] Assessment as an aid to learning encompasses benefits such as reinforcement, confidence building, involvement and building on strengths.

For these reasons from its first edition EFLIT has ended with an exam to assess the level reached by participants upon completion of the course. However, this final exam aims to be a proficiency test rather than an achievement test (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998; Jimenez / Rizzuti 2008), 12

This was further developed in A.R. Scott-Monkhouse. 2013. Creating a profile for Italian users of legal English in a perspective of lifelong learning. The EFLIT experience. In R. Vystrþilová (ed.), Legal Language: from Theory to Practice. Olomouc: Inova: 209-216.

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by using integrative testing rather than discrete point testing. Indeed, it is intended to have predictive validity in terms of the participants’ future performance by using contextualised language, rather than actually test the progress made, as the specificity of language for professional purposes lies in the learners’ actual needs to use the language in specific communication situations (Petrashchuk 2010): “The ultimate proof for an ESP course is how well learners can fare when using English in the target situation; after the course they should be more effective and more confident” (DudleyEvans / St. John 1998: 210). Participants themselves have claimed to be generally more interested in improving their English than actually gaining credits in the continuous learning programme, as their main aim is to be able to “use English in real life situations”. Nevertheless, the final exam is an achievement test in that it covers the overall objectives of the course syllabus rather than single, individual items (Baxter 1997). Past papers of existing exams such as ILEC and ToLES13 Advanced appeared to be too difficult for EFLIT participants, thus Stefano Maffei and I as the teacher of the “English for Law” module opted for a test based on existing exams for types of tasks and skills to be tested, but tailored to both the participants and the EFLIT course as regards level and contents. Over the years the EFLIT end-of-course exam has evolved and currently comprises the following five components: Use of English (i.e. lexis, grammar and functions), Reading, Listening, Writing and Speaking, each carrying 20% of the total weight. The paper-based part (i.e. Use of English, Reading, Listening and Writing sections) is administered and marked by the language teachers, and lasts approximately 1.5 hours. The single components are further subdivided into: a) Use of English: multiple choice cloze text with more questions related to vocabulary (55%) than grammar (45%) (Sindoni 2008) (testing collocations, false friends, specific terminology, multi-part verbs, and common phrases); transforming sentences from informal to formal register (including moving from active to passive voice, reported statements and use of modals), or redrafting from ‘legalese’ into modern, plain English; matching words to definitions; b) Reading: two law-related texts from journals, newsletters, websites, professional correspondence, and/or contracts (one text with true/false comprehension questions, i.e. reading for detailed information, and a gapped text with simple matching of removed 13

Test of Legal English Skills (www.toleslegal.com).

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sentences to be re-inserted in the text by referring to linking words and logical connectors, e.g. pronouns, conjunctions, verb tenses, etc.); c) Listening: two recordings, i.e. a conversation between two colleagues in order to complete a simple text (e.g. fax/email/memo/ agenda/diary), and a mini-lecture having a professional focus in order to complete notes (gap-filling with one to three content words, i.e. nouns, numbers, adjectives, verbs) (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998). Each recording is played twice and time is given to read the rubrics and the questions beforehand, so that the context is provided and any background knowledge is triggered; d) Writing: three tasks, i.e. correcting sentences containing mistakes commonly made by Italian learners of (legal) English; completing sentences from a contract or letter using standard phrases; composing a communicative piece of writing (i.e. email, memo, etc. of approximately 100 words) as a response to a prompt providing input, purpose and specification of audience – not only is this an integrated task (reading and writing), it also corresponds to most real-life situations as “study- and work-related writing is written for a readership, for a purpose, and about a specific matter” (ibid.: 225); e) Speaking: a 15-minute interview on a one-to-one basis conducted by American visiting professors and divided into three parts (ibid.). The candidate starts by providing personal and professional information; this introductory ice-breaking activity is followed by a roleplay situation in which the candidate interacts with the examiner by both answering and asking questions (ibid.), i.e. a simulation with high interactive authenticity based on a role assigned by the examiner. Finally, the candidate discusses a professional topic chosen previously in order to prove his/her ability in presenting information and arguments, expressing opinions and giving reasons: the topic can be something relevant to the candidate’s profession and expertise; alternatively, EFLIT can provide a list of topics to choose from (e.g. contracts, company law, property law, the Italian vs. the American legal system, a seminar which the candidate particularly enjoyed, etc.). The criteria used in the sections requiring subjective marking are based on the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). In particular, the criteria used to assess the writing section are: task achievement, register and style, use of paragraphs, logical sequencing and text cohesion

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(discourse markers, linkers, verb tenses, etc.), grammatical and lexical range and accuracy, spelling and punctuation, whilst the criteria used to assess the speaking section are: fluency, interactive communication (including discourse management, i.e. coherence and cohesion), grammar and vocabulary (range and accuracy of language resources), and pronunciation (Baxter 1997). The EFLIT exam has been defined by participants as “more challenging than expected”, major complaints being that “There wasn’t enough time to carry out all the tasks or at least do them carefully” and “The ‘listening’ was very difficult, they spoke too fast”. However, the Speaking section has generally been judged as “motivating, fun, gratifying”. On average examinees scored 86% in the Reading Section, 73% in the Speaking section, 70% in Listening (despite their gloomy impressions at the end of test), 67% in Use of English, and 61% in Writing. The overall average score was 71%.

ILEC From the start participants have been encouraged to aim for ILEC. The main reason for this is that the result is “tangible”, as the certificate can be easily linked to the European Language Portfolio (ELP), and has widespread recognition, thus can be used in several contexts, and not only in Italy. It is reliable thanks to the standardisation of texts, tasks and examiners through regular piloting and coordination sessions, and its criteria are reasonably clear for the test-takers. In general, motivation of candidates is high as it is both challenging and rewarding. ILEC is set at level B2/C1, aims “to assess the candidates’ ability to operate in English in an international legal environment” (ILEC Handbook 2007: 4) and is comprised of four components, i.e. Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking, each carrying 25% of the total weight. The “pen and paper” section lasts approximately 3 hours and 15 minutes, and the oral part 16 minutes. Each of the components is further divided into: a) Reading: six tasks (three tasks test Use of English through multiple choice cloze, open cloze, and word formation; three tasks having greater weighting test comprehension of written texts at word, phrase, sentence and paragraph level through multiple matching, matching of sentences removed from a text, and multiple choice), b) Writing: two tasks having different weighting (writing a letter and writing a memorandum, both in response to stimuli provided, within a context, and for a given purpose and target reader),

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c) Listening: four tasks (multiple choice comprehension questions of unrelated short recordings, multiple choice comprehension questions of a longer dialogue, note-taking from an informational monologue, and multiple matching comprehension questions of short thematically linked monologues), d) Speaking in paired format with examiner’s scripted frame (four parts, i.e. ice breaking section of candidates talking about their professional experience, short presentation of a topic, collaborative task to negotiate the solution of a problem situation, and discussion on the topic of the collaborative task). The focus in the Writing section is on “concise expression, accuracy of language, organisation of content and appropriacy” (ILEC Handbook 2007: 20), and also task achievement, relevance, respect for genre conventions, style, register, layout, balanced organisation, logical cohesion, range of vocabulary and structure; in general, credit is given for the candidate’s effort at successful communication and complex language attempted. In the Speaking part candidates “show their ability to manage discourse and express themselves coherently using appropriate language” (ILEC Handbook 2007: 43), and are awarded marks by trained and standardised examiners according to the appropriacy, range and accuracy of grammar and vocabulary, discourse management (i.e. extent, coherence and relevance of their contributions), pronunciation (including stress at both word and sentence level, rhythm and intonation), and interactive communication (i.e. initiating, responding, turn-taking, maintaining interaction, etc.). The choice of resorting to internationally recognised testers can be justified for the reasons previously mentioned. However, ILEC does have some drawbacks: - it is de-contextualised from the Italian system and the needs of professionals in Italy; - despite its external validity, its international recognition, and the amount of study needed to obtain it, it does not lead to the awarding of any credits in the Italian continuous education system; - it requires a great deal of specific exam preparation work so that the examinees become familiar with the rubrics, the format and the tasks, i.e. they need to practise the strategies which are necessary to pass the test, thus obtaining the certificate appears to be more important than the skills acquired and this influences the process of

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teaching/learning (i.e. teaching/learning “to the test” – Filice / Pasqua 2008); it assesses the final ‘product’ only, and the learning process which led to reaching that level appears to be virtually ignored; the level required is very high and easily leads to frustration and discouragement; it generates high levels of performance anxiety and stress, therefore at least partly fails to meet the objective of relating the exam to a positive learning experience, producing a positive impact and building confidence (Dudley Evans / St. John 1998); the different components of the exams (i.e. the macro-skills) are equally weighted, whilst specific skills need to be emphasised if the exam is to have a clearly defined relevance to the needs and prospective uses of the candidates.

ILEC pre-testing as experienced by EFLIT participants Some of the most motivated participants decided to sit the ILEC pretest, which is a “mock-exam” in which Cambridge English Language Assessment trials exam materials in order to ensure that they are appropriate, accurate, fair, reliable and suitable, and provides feedback on the candidates’ performance. Pre-testing allows potential candidates to practise taking the exam using genuine questions under exam conditions and test their skills in the paper-based sections of ILEC: they are given scores for the Reading and Listening papers, and receive information about how they performed in the Writing test as it is marked by genuine Cambridge English Language Assessment examiners. This helps students know which areas they need most practice in, and gives them experience and confidence in taking tests. 14 The Language Centre of Parma University is a recognised “live” centre for Cambridge English Language Assessment, and since 2007 the pre-test has been administered and supervised by myself once a year. Only 29 EFLIT participants have actually taken the pre-test, and have been extremely satisfied with the whole experience, but results have not been very encouraging. On average, the scores obtained were: 56% in the Reading section, 45% in the Listening section, and 52% in the Writing section (with vocabulary, structure and language mostly judged as being “satisfactory”). There is no Speaking component in the pre-test. 14

Information retrieved from http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/about-us/what-wedo/producing-exams/pretesting/.

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Here too candidates complained of the “frenzied timing”, difficulty of the tasks and complexity of the texts. However, rather than being a reason for discouragement from eventually attempting ILEC, this has had a positive washforward effect as it has turned out to be a good indicator of what has been achieved, and what needs further attention and remedial work (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998; Gardner / Miller 1999). It must be emphasised, though, that only the most confident and least anxious candidates chose to try out their ability in English, and this figure represents only 2% of the total number of EFLIT participants. To our knowledge only one EFLIT participant has actually taken ILEC. After having specifically prepared for the exam, this candidate obtained a C1 pass, with an overall 70% score. The Statement of Results outlined the profile of a candidate who proved to be exceptional at reading, good at both listening and speaking, and just below good at writing. Other participants have expressed the wish to take the official exam but so far have postponed because of little self-confidence, lack of time to dedicate to preparing specifically for the exam, and the awareness that this is essential to be able to obtain the certificate. From the candidates’ feedback, time-management appears to be a major issue in both the EFLIT end-of-course exam and the ILEC pre-test, with some candidates not being able to complete all tasks. This is most probably due to a completely different approach needed, as examinees in Italy are usually granted more time. The final written exams taken by high school leavers to obtain their final qualification (Diploma di Maturità) last on average between four and six hours, and the exam for admission to the bar lasts eight hours. However, it is not only a question of overall time available. These exams tend to focus on a very limited number of tasks (one or two at the most), thus examinees can spend a great deal of time carrying out the assignment, and are not used to having to deal with several different tasks (some of which are weighted differently) which test different microskills in a limited amount of time. Candidates therefore need to develop suitable exam strategies through specific training in carefully planning the time they spend on single tasks, the order in which they deal with them, and how they actually tackle them in order to avoid pitfalls – this indeed will translate into an essential skill in their daily professional life too. They also need to become fully familiar with the format of the exam, the rubrics and the tasks themselves, and therefore need to practise the types of exercise, also by working “against the clock”. Moreover, candidates are not allowed to use a dictionary in the pre-test or ILEC, whilst they can consult codes during the bar exam. However, using resources does not only replicate both previous exam experiences

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and real-life situations (where they can, if not must, consult reference materials), it also helps lower levels of anxiety, test their dictionary skills, and further test their ability to manage both resources and time available. Besides, developing coping skills does include dictionary skills (Willis 1996), in particular with the use of monolingual dictionaries. However, this needs to be done in such a way so as not allow learners to become ‘dictionary addicts’, i.e. depend too much on understanding each single word rather than processing texts according to a ‘top-down’ view. Another important point to be taken into consideration is the candidates’ perception of the exam itself. The general feeling is that what is being tested is their competence in the language and how much/well they have learnt, rather than their ability to cope with new situations using what they have acquired. The results obtained therefore come to reflect their performance in terms of what they cannot do rather than what they are able to deal with, and this ultimately tends to have a negative, or at least disappointing effect on the ego of people who feel their professional image is being assessed too. Instead, as Gardner and Miller (1999: 222) put it: Assessments provide an opportunity for reflection. They can help learners to gain a clearer picture of their abilities, encourage reflection on learning and provide evidence of their achievements.

It is thus essential to emphasise the value of the test (either in-house or external) as a tool to verify what they are able to do at the end of the course so that they can then focus on strengths and weaknesses in their process of continuous learning. There are therefore obvious psychological and practical reasons related to poor performance in the ILEC pre-test and in some sections of the EFLIT exam, with time being the candidates’ greatest enemy and outcomes related to not having suitable exam strategies, growing anxiety and frustration, and fear of losing face. Furthermore, in the case of ILEC, the exam is not entirely perceived by the candidates as being relevant to their needs and connected to the context they operate in, despite its validity in terms of content, method and techniques involved (Porcelli 1994).

What next? What has emerged is the need for a test which is valid, reliable, relevant, accurate, practical and standardised to assess the level reached by participants at the end of the EFLIT course, and which translates their

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competence into performance in the real world without discouraging them or influencing the process of teaching/learning (i.e. teaching/learning to the test). This has revealed a gap in the current situation in Italy, where there is no specific test at a level lower than ILEC to assess and certify the language skills of legal professionals in English. What is needed is a test which, just like ILEC, assesses proficiency rather than achievement, i.e. looks at future use of language rather than what has been learned in the course as a result of teaching (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998; Jimenez / Rizzuti 2008). Given the constraints of the exam setting and format, and the level reached by participants, the EFLIT exam may not be a ‘true’ measure of their language competence in real world contexts, but a valid indication of how they can cope. In order to design an exam which is relevant to the target group, suitable for the purposes it might be used for (e.g. career advancement) and competitive on the Italian market, it was necessary to draw up a profile of our ‘typical’ participant through a detailed needs analysis which would allow us to better identify their real needs, requirements and expectations, and take the different elements into account (Baxter 1997). A specific questionnaire was therefore devised with the help of Stefano Maffei, and piloted before public use by a few PhD students working at the Department of Law who were asked to answer the questions, time themselves, and provide feedback on how well/easily they understood the questions and if they felt any important issues had been left out (ALTE 2011). A few amendments were made on the basis of their comments, and an electronic version was then uploaded on the website of the University Language Centre.15 The link was emailed to both participants of the 201011 edition and alumni (Dudley-Evans / St. John 1998), with the explanation that the feedback would contribute to improving the course and also be used for research purposes. The idea of involving both current participants and alumni served the dual purpose of obtaining ‘contemporary’ and follow-up feedback (Jordan 1997). On the basis of the questionnaire results, a new EFLIT exam at B1/B2 level of English for specific purposes is being devised to assess the candidates’ competences in the macro-skills defined by the Council of Europe (i.e. reading comprehension, listening comprehension, written production, oral production and interaction) by adapting the content and tasks of the test itself, and the weighting of the components to the candidates’ professional role in an attempt to blend together immediate needs and long-term needs within a perspective of life-long learning. The 15

http://www.cla.unipr.it/valutazione/eflit.asp.

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test aims to be representative of the real-life situations usually faced by lawyers and accountants in their jobs, and to allow examiners to make reliable inferences on the candidate’s capacity to manage these situations. Although the format recalls Cambridge English Language Assessment exams, the exam itself is to be essentially different as it aims to be a proficiency test of language for specific purposes which differentiates itself from international language certificates whose contents, level, standards and criteria are too high and too general for Italian professionals. The first main difference lies in the weighting of the components to reflect the participants’ actual needs according to the answers provided in the survey: Listening 29%, Writing 26%, Speaking 24%, Reading 21%. The Use-of-English section is to become part of the Writing and Reading sections. The criteria and score bands to be used in components which require subjective marking are defined according to the CEFR and with reference to internationally recognised certificates following the indications of the Association of Language Testers in Europe (ALTE).16 The whole written part (Reading, Listening and Writing papers) is to last approximately 90 minutes, with tasks within each section having different weighting (as in ILEC), and candidates will be allowed to use monolingual dictionaries. The Speaking section still needs improvement as the frame is not scripted and the examiners are neither specifically trained nor standardised for language assessment. What needs to be assessed is the test taker’s ability to interact with the examiner, communicate facts, talk about topics of personal and professional interest, link and develop ideas, support opinions, explain in detail, hypothesise, and paraphrase. This part necessarily includes “active listening” on behalf of the candidate (DudleyEvans / St. John 1998), i.e. the vital skill needed in real-life spoken interactions which involves processing, understanding and responding to spoken input, whilst paying attention to both verbal and non-verbal clues, i.e. generally ‘building up a relationship’. The new version of the EFLIT test has not been tried out yet as a whole and the project is ongoing.17

16

www.alte.org. This was further developed in A.R. Scott-Monkhouse 2014. Towards a standardised qualification of English as a foreign language for Italian professionals practising in the legal sector. In V. K. Bhatia / G. Garzone / R. Salvi / G. Tessuto / C. Williams (eds), Explorations in Language and Law. Language and Law in Academic and Professional Settings: Analyses and Applications. Aprilia: Novalogos/Ortica editrice: 1/2014: 287-300. 17

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Conclusions By adopting an integrated skills approach EFLIT aims to be representative of the real-life situations which the lawyers and accountants can expect to encounter in their jobs. In other words, it provides participants with a ‘holistic’ experience of the language while taking into account the context in which the candidates are to work, i.e. the requirements of their profession in Italy, and helps them analyse their use of the language in order to develop efficient learning skills. It is to be considered a starting point rather than a ‘training’ course as it is a step towards autonomy in the improvement of their language and legal skills in a perspective of lifelong learning, pursuant to the specific requirements of their profession. The end-of-course exam aims to be a recognised assessment tool with face, content and construct validity as it is criteria-referenced and utilises adapted authentic tasks and materials which reflect proficiency rather than achievement in order to reliably predict the legal professionals’ future performance. The use of materials, tasks and strategies which resemble the candidates’ real life uses of the language not only stimulates their motivation (Hughes 2003), but also responds to their needs with tasks that mirror the activities which they are called to carry out within their job, and that allow them to try out their skills in relation to both legal language and professional needs. The exam itself is also to be considered a ‘stepping stone’ in their continuous learning as it is a tool to be used to attest that B1/B2 level of Legal English has been reached. In today’s world individuals are required to establish their credentials by proving their abilities, and the objective is to define a legal professional who is a competent and confident user of English with a view to further professional development. In other words, a truly international figure.

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Appendix Table 1. A summary of the main features of the three exams ILEC pretesting

EFLIT Description

Examiners Criteria

- end-of-course exam - contents related to job - tailored to course and participants trainers and visiting professors previously defined (CEFR)

ILEC

B2/C1 level of CEFR Language for Specific Purposes

B2/C1 level of CEFR Language for Specific Purposes

Cambridge ESOL examiners defined by Cambridge ESOL

Cambridge ESOL examiners defined by Cambridge ESOL

Table 2. A comparison of the weighting of the components of the three exams

COMPONENTS

Use of English Reading Listening Writing Speaking

EFLIT

ILEC pre-testing

ILEC

20%

----

---

20% 20% 20% 20%

25% 25% 25% (25%)

25% 25% 25% 25%

[NB: not present in pretesting]

Table 3. A comparison of the results obtained by EFLIT participants in the three exams

RESULTS

EFLIT

ILEC pre-testing

ILEC

Use of English Reading

67% 86%

--56%

---

Listening

73%

45%

Writing Speaking

61% 70%

52% not present in pre-testing

70% score

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Table 4. A summary and comparison of the tasks in the three exams. [* these tasks carry greater weight]

EFLIT

ILEC

MC cloze (vocabulary > grammar)

Use of English

sentence transformation (informal to formal, legalese to plain language) matching words to definitions T/F on law-related text

Reading

gapped text (sentences) on legal theme

MC cloze Open cloze Word formation MM reading comprehension * gapped text (removed sentences to be inserted) *

Listening

completion of simple text from recording of conversation between colleagues note-completion from recording on law-related topic sentence correction

Writing

completion of letter or contract with standard phrases communicative message to a colleague (prompt provided, approx 100 words)

MC reading comprehension * MC related to unrelated short recordings MC related to longer dialogue note taking from informational dialogue MM of short thematically linked monologues

letter (prompt provided, approx 120-180 words) memorandum* (rubric provided, approx 200250 words)

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Speaking

(two examiners; in pairs; scripted frame; approx. 16 mins) mini-presentation (personal and professional information)

mini-presentation (personal and professional information)

presentation of a topic negotiating the solution of a problem situation

role-play

discussion linked to problem solving task

discussion of a legal topic (previously chosen)

References ALTE 2011. Manual for Language Test Development and Examining. Strasbourg. At http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/ManualLanguageTestAlte2011_EN.pdf. Baxter A. 1997. Evaluating Your Students. London: Richmond Publishing. Dudley-Evans T. / M. J. St. John 1998. Developments in English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Filice S. / M. Pasqua 2008. Reaching CampusOne objectives: from “specific” competence to certification. In M. G. Sindoni (ed.), Testing in University Language Centres. Soveria Mannelli (Cz): Rubettino editore: 65-82. Gardner D. / L. Miller 1999. Establishing Self-Access: from Theory to Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hughes A. 2003. Testing for Language Teachers (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jimenez J. / D. Rizzuti 2008. An investigation into the factors affecting the content and design of achievement tests. In M. G. Sindoni (ed.), Testing in University Language Centres. Soveria Mannelli (Cz): Rubettino editore: 83-100. Jordan R. R. 1997. English for Academic Purposes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Little D. 2000. We’re all in it together: exploring the interdependence of teacher and learner autonomy. In L. Karlsson / F. Kjisik / J. Nordlund (eds), All Together Now. Helsinki: University of Helsinki Language Centre: 45-56.

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Nunan D. 1988. The Learner-Centred Curriculum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Petrashchuk O.P. 2010. Testing Language for Specific Purposes. In Proceedings for the NAU 2010. 3: 149-155. At http://archive.nbuv.gov.ua/portal/natural/vnau/2010_3/6-1%20pet.pdf. Porcelli A. 1994. Educazione linguistica e valutazione [Language Education and Assessment]. Torino: Utet. Sindoni M. G. 2008. Testing English at University. Some reflections on validation. In M. G. Sindoni (ed.), Testing in University Language Centres. Soveria Mannelli (Cz): Rubettino editore: 139-151. University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations 2007. International Legal English Certificate Handbook for Teachers, Cambridge: UCLES. Widdowson H. 1983. Learning Purpose and Language Use. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis J. 1996. A Framework for Task-Based Learning. Essex: Longman.

PART FOUR: PROPOSALS AND CASE STUDIES IN CONTENT AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATED LEARNING (CLIL)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN INSEGNARE SECONDO LA METODOLOGIA CLIL: L’ESPERIENZA DEL ‘CORSO DI PERFEZIONAMENTO’ (20 CFU) TERESINA BARBERO, ADRIANA TERESA DAMASCELLI E MARIE-BERTHE VITTOZ UNIVERSITY OF TURIN, ITALY

Introduzione Secondo quanto contenuto nel Libro Bianco (White Paper on Education and Training 1995) pubblicato dalla Commissione Europea, i bisogni linguistici dei cittadini europei sono diversi e per questo motivo è necessario promuovere l’apprendimento delle lingue sin dai primi livelli di istruzione e favorirne lo sviluppo di competenze elevate attraverso l’insegnamento di contenuti non linguistici. La diffusione della metodologia CLIL rappresenta la risposta alla crescente domanda di competenze linguistiche elevate ed efficaci che consentano via via l’acquisizione e il trasferimento delle conoscenze. Non solo, come si legge sul sito dell'Unione Europea, la metodologia CLIL offre vari benefici: favorisce la costruzione della conoscenza e la comprensione interculturale e lo sviluppo di capacità di comunicazione interculturale, migliora la competenza linguisticocomunicativa, e consente la creazione di forme di didattica diversificate che aumentano nei discenti la motivazione ad apprendere la lingua. A questo proposito, progetti europei, corsi di formazione e aggiornamento rivolti ai docenti della scuola e giornate di studio o convegni sono realizzati per fornire informazioni su aspetti teorici e pratici della metodologia. Grazie a queste iniziative, il CLIL è oramai curriculare in molte scuole europee. In Italia, il decreto n. 88 del 15 marzo 2010

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introduce negli ultimi anni dei licei e degli istituti tecnici l’insegnamento di una disciplina, detta non linguistica, in lingua straniera. Questa prassi didattica sancita dal MIUR è sicuramente innovativa ma non del tutto nuova nella scuola italiana, poiché di fatto generalizza, rendendola in qualche modo obbligatoria, una didattica condotta sinora a livello sperimentale da istituzioni scolastiche e singoli insegnanti. In questo senso gli atti ministeriali che definiscono il profilo del docente e impartiscono istruzioni per la sua formazione sono, in ordine di tempo, l’ultimo atto di un lungo percorso. Intendiamo ricordare le tappe rilevanti di questo percorso, sottolineando in particolare il ruolo sostenuto negli ultimi dieci anni dal Centro Linguistico di Ateneo dell’Università degli Studi di Torino (CLA-UniTO) nella diffusione della metodologia CLIL sino all’applicazione del decreto n. 6 del 12 aprile 2012 che definisce appunto il profilo del docente CLIL e disciplina i corsi di perfezionamento per la formazione affidati alle università che ne abbiano i requisiti. Quindi illustreremo le modalità secondo cui l’Università di Torino ha realizzato concretamente questa formazione attraverso i corsi che le sono stati affidati.

Le sperimentazioni e i progetti CLIL Il progetto nazionale Lingue 2000 inseriva La lingua veicolare fra le proposte di formazione, sfruttando di fatto una possibilità già prevista nella scuola italiana, quella di introdurre, qualora richiesta, degli insegnamenti disciplinari, anche parziali, in lingua diversa dall’italiano.1 Successivamente, nel 2004 il Piano d’Azione Europeo presentava il CLIL come attività prioritaria per diffondere l’apprendimento delle lingue comunitarie e questo piano diede spunto a svariate sperimentazioni nelle scuole sostenute, in molti casi, da progetti nazionali ed europei. Il CLA-UniTO Centro Linguistico di Ateneo, allora Centro Linguistico Interfacoltà per le Facoltà Umanistiche (CLIFU), che è sempre stato sensibile alle politiche linguistiche dell’Unione Europea, raccoglieva questi stimoli all’innovazione costituendo un “Gruppo di lavoro CLIL” per intraprendere sul tema del CLIL varie iniziative.2 Così, dal 2006 al 2009 il CLA-UniTO ha aderito ad un progetto europeo consentendo al “gruppo di lavoro CLIL” di contribuire. Chiamato LICI (Language in Content 1

Art.4 punto 3 del DPR 275 dell’8 marzo 1999. Il CLA-UniTO si è costituito con Decreto Rettorale n. 3943 del 28/6/2013 ed è il risultato della trasformazione del CLIFU avvenuta a seguito della Legge 240/2010 sul riordino degli Atenei e delle strutture relative.

2

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Instruction), il progetto aveva come obiettivo principale di indagare il ruolo della lingua nel CLIL.3 I risultati sono contenuti su un sito web (http://lici.utu.fi/) dedicato e in un manuale.4 Inoltre, dal 2008 al 2011, il CLA-UniTO ha organizzato tre giornate di formazione, caratterizzate da contributi plenari di esperti internazionali al mattino, e atelier/workshop sulle esperienze condotte nelle scuole al pomeriggio. Di seguito in ordine cronologico le giornate organizzate:5 -

-

19 febbraio 2009, “Comunicare le discipline in lingua straniera (2). Dalla teoria alla pratica”, 18 febbraio 2010, “La scuola che cambia: trasversalità culturali, interculturali, linguistiche”, seguita da un follow-up di tre incontri, sullo stato dell’arte in Europa e in Italia, l’uso delle tecnologie, e la valutazione, in risposta alle richieste pervenute dagli insegnanti partecipanti all’evento. 14 febbraio 2011, “La formazione CLIL: Università e Scuola in Sinergia”.

In particolare, i contributi della giornata di formazione tenutasi nell’anno accademico 2010-2011 sono stati raccolti e pubblicati nella rivista internazionale Synergies Italies (2012) coordinata dal Groupe d'études et de recherches pour le français langue international (GERFLINT).6 Più recentemente, dal 29 al 31 maggio 2014, il CLA-UniTo ha organizzato il XX Seminario Nazionale dell’Associazione Italiana dei Centri Linguistici Universitari (AICLU) dal titolo Innovazioni tecnologiche, 3

Il progetto ha previsto vari momenti di scambio e condivisione che hanno culminato in una conferenza dal titolo “LINC: Learning, Innovation & Creativity” in CLIL tenutasi presso l’Università di Turku, Finland dal 25 al 26 settembre 2009 (http://linc.utu.fi/Sivusto/Main_page.html). 4 Il sito è mantenuto dalla Commissione Europea per favorire la diffusione di questa e di tutte le iniziative sulle politiche dell’Unione Europea Il manuale è disponibile in formato elettronico in lingua inglese sul sito del progetto al seguente indirizzo web http://lici.utu.fi/handbook.htm. Nella forma cartacea, il manuale è stato pubblicato anche in francese e in tedesco. 5 Nel frattempo, l’Università di Torino aveva già manifestato interesse nella metodologia CLIL inserendo moduli CLIL nei percorsi della Scuola Interateneo di Specializzazione per la Formazione degli Insegnanti della Scuola Secondaria “SIS” Piemonte (2007) per la formazione iniziale degli insegnanti per i docenti in servizio nei Corsi Abilitanti Speciali L. 143/ter, DM 85/2005. 6 Il volume di riferimento è Synergies Italies 8, 2012 (a cura di P. Kottelat). Il numero è disponibile online all’indirizzo http://ressources-cla.univ-fcomte.fr/ gerflint/Italie8/italie8.html.

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metodologiche e creatività nell’insegnamento delle lingue straniere e nella formazione degli insegnanti.7 Il Seminario ha dato ampio spazio anche alla metodologia CLIL dedicandone l’ultima giornata in cui il contributo plenario di un esperto internazionale in ambito CLIL e quello di un rappresentante del MIUR hanno dato avvio alle presentazioni previste.8 Il gruppo di lavoro costituitosi al CLA-UniTO per promuovere il CLIL ha visto i suoi componenti intervenire in seminari e convegni internazionali dal 2008; è quindi naturale che abbia risposto fra i primi all’appello del MIUR che decide di affidare alle strutture universitarie ed in particolare i Centri Linguistici di Ateneo l’organizzazione dei corsi di perfezionamento CLIL, partecipando all’apposito bando e risultando tra le università assegnatarie.9 La realizzazione del Corso è avvenuta con la collaborazione del CLAT (Centro Linguistico di Ateneo) dell’Università di Genova con la quale l’Università di Torino ha già collaborato per la realizzazione di un Master CLIL in e-learning nell’anno accademico 20112012.

Il Corso di Perfezionamento Metodologico CLIL (20CFU) Verifica delle Competenze Linguistiche Per l’attuazione del Corso, il CLA-UniTO si è attenuto alle disposizioni ministeriali. Una volta ottenute le liste dei docenti aventi diritto alla formazione dall’USR Piemonte, si è proceduto con la verifica delle competenze linguistiche richieste per poter accedere al Corso (B2 e C1). A tale fine, il CLA-UniTO ha elaborato un test di accertamento, informatizzato e reso disponibile su piattaforma MOODLE dal CLAT e previsto un colloquio orale per i docenti privi di certificazione. Per i docenti provvisti di certificazione B2 e C1 si è proceduto, comunque, ad un accertamento con un colloquio orale.10

7

Una raccolta dei contributi presentati durante le giornate del Seminario sarà pubblicata come Atti del Seminario. 8 Phil Ball ha contribuito con “CLIL in 3 dimensions” e l’ispettrice MIUR Diana Saccardo con “Riconcettualizzare l’apprendimento linguistico in CLIL”. 9 Intanto, nell’anno accademico 2011-2012, l’Università di Torino lavora con l’Università di Genova per la realizzazione e attuazione del Corso Master CLIL online. 10 La decisione di sottoporre ad una verifica anche i docenti provvisti di certificazione con livello B2 e C1, si è resa necessaria per ragioni di tipo temporale che possono incidere nel caso in cui si sia conseguito il livello in tempi ben

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Dal sillabo alle attività del Corso Il sillabo del corso di perfezionamento è stato costruito sul Decreto n. 6 del 16/4/2012 ed in particolare su quanto contenuto negli Allegati A e B. In primo luogo, il profilo del docente CLIL (Immagine 1), che prevede come caratterizzanti la presenza di: -

-

competenze linguistiche di livello avanzato tali da poter trattare la disciplina insegnata; capacità disciplinare, tale da utilizzare i saperi inerenti coerentemente ai curricula e didattizzarli in modo da integrare lingua e contenuto; capacità metodologico-didattiche, tali da consentire la progettazione di percorsi CLIL in modo autonomo utilizzando materiali, risorse e strumenti tecnologici con il fine di favorire l'apprendimento.

Immagine 1. Profilo del docente CLIL secondo quanto contenuto nel Decreto n. 6 del 16/4/2012 (Allegato A)

antecedenti alla partecipazione al corso senza avere ulteriormente praticato attività linguistiche.

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In secondo luogo, la ripartizione dei contenuti, tenendo conto delle attività formative, che prevedono anche lo svolgimento di un tirocinio, dell’ambito disciplinare, del settore scientifico-disciplinare, e dei relativi crediti formativi (Immagine 2).

Immagine 2. Ripartizione dei contenuti in relazione ai crediti formativi secondo quanto contenuto nel Decreto n. 6 del 16/4/2012 (Allegato B)

Le attività del corso sono state quindi ripartite in sei moduli, di cui i primi tre riferiti ad attività di base, riguardanti gli aspetti teorici e metodologici trasversali: -

M1: modalità di acquisizione e apprendimento di una LS, lessico specifico

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-

M2: principi base del CLIL, progettazione e dimensione metodologico didattica, materiali e sussidi didattici M3: valutazione e ricerca-azione

e attività caratterizzanti, didattiche disciplinari in prospettiva veicolare: -

M4: laboratori e seminari con esperti disciplinari

- M5: progettazione: materiali e sussidi didattici, elaborazione di percorsi - M6: uso delle TIC. Le modalità di erogazione del Corso hanno tenuto conto delle indicazioni ministeriali. Il corso di perfezionamento è stato quindi elaborato mantenendo per le attività uno svolgimento pari al 40% in praesentia e 60% online. Ogni modulo è stato svolto in parte in presenza, 50% circa, e online per la restante parte, ad eccezione del modulo M6 relativo alle tecnologie svolto interamente on line.11 Come altre attività comprese nel percorso formativo (cfr. Allegato A), il Corso ha previsto un tirocinio con modalità ricerca-azione e l’esame finale.

Le tecnologie e il Corso di Perfezionamento: il Modulo M6 Ai moduli previsti per le attività di base e caratterizzanti, è stato aggiunto il modulo M6 dedicato all’uso delle ICT applicate alla didattica CLIL con lo scopo sia di far familiarizzare i docenti con l’uso delle tecnologie sia di far sviluppare strategie specifiche per la didattica CLIL. La realizzazione di questo modulo ha coinvolto più docenti formatori i quali hanno presentato strumenti per scopi diversi. Nella prima parte del modulo si è focalizzato sul recupero delle competenze informatiche di base, mentre nella seconda parte sono stati utilizzati programmi per la creazione e l’editing di video, spesso necessari quando i docenti filmano le attività didattiche e devono poi adattarle o convertirle per la pubblicazione o divulgazione. La terza parte del modulo ha fornito informazioni e istruzioni su alcuni programmi gratuiti disponibili in rete per la realizzazione di test: questi consentono la creazione di esercizi a scelta multipla, di completamento, labelling con inserimento di attività di videoascolto. Nella quarta e quinta parte del modulo sono stati presentati 11

È possibile consultare all’indirizzo web qui di seguito il calendario generale del Corso in cui è mostrata la scansione temporale di ciascun modulo http://www.cla.unito.it/Didattica/CLIL/Info/CalendarioCorsoCLIL20CFU.pdf.

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strumenti utili allo studio del lessico attraverso l’estrazione di informazioni da raccolte di testi selezionati specificatamente, chiamate comunemente corpora. I docenti hanno potuto analizzare il lessico e la terminologia estratta dai corpora disciplinari da loro in precedenza compilati e fare riflessioni sull’uso in contesto. La produzione di concordanze, vale a dire di liste di contesti in cui l’elemento lessicale e terminologico cercato occorre, consente di determinare quali informazioni dare allo studente negli usi. La sesta e ultima parte del modulo si è concentrata sul Web 2.0, vale a dire su alcune di quelle applicazioni online che hanno determinato l’evoluzione del web rendendolo dinamico attraverso la presenza di blog, forum, wiki e chat, di piattaforme di condivisione, come YouTube e Flickr, e di social network, come Facebook e Twitter.

La piattaforma e-learning Per le attività online, il CLA-UniTO ha usufruito della piattaforma elearning realizzata e predisposta dal CLAT (Immagine 3). La piattaforma, creata nella concezione dell’apprendimento in ambiente e-learning è stata organizzata per rispondere a varie esigenze. Le aule, una per ogni docente formatore, sono servite per il caricamento delle lezioni, materiali e risorse utili alla didattica e comunicazioni e avvisi anche di carattere logistico. Altre aule sono state create per fornire un supporto tecnico, per fornire indicazioni in merito al tirocinio e, ancora, per consentire ai docenti formatori di avere uno spazio per la condivisione sull’andamento del corso, per il confronto e, infine, per lo scambio di informazioni con i tutor. Ciascuna aula ha permesso la realizzazione, in spazi creati appositamente, e lo svolgimento di varie attività come quella di scambio e interazione fra i docenti corsisti e i docenti formatori nei forum creati settimanalmente, oppure il caricamento dei compiti e la restituzione con correzioni e valutazione, e ancora la condivisione di materiali per il lavoro collaborativo. La piattaforma ha reso possibile anche la comunicazione non condivisa a tutti, come nei forum, attraverso l’uso di un servizio di posta interna.

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Immagine 3. Piattaforma e-learning del il Corso di Perfezionamento: pagina di accesso.

I cardini della metodologia CLIL “Come costruire un CLIL di qualità?” è la questione di fondo che ha rappresentato il filo conduttore del corso. In estrema sintesi gli aspetti salienti della metodologia costantemente sviluppati sono quelli che seguono.

Integrazione della dimensione disciplinare con quella linguistico-culturale e cognitiva In altre parole è la presenza in ogni progettazione CLIL di quelle che Do Coyle (2001: 28) definisce i quattro principi chiave, le “4 C” del CLIL: Content, Communication, Cognition, Culture. The first principle places successful content or subject learning and the acquisition of knowledge, skills and understanding inherent to that discipline at the very heart of the learning process […]. The symbiotic relationship between language and subject understanding demands a focus on how subjects are taught whilst working with and through another language rather than in another language […]. The second principle defines language as a conduit for both communication and learning. From this perspective, language is learned through using it in authentic and

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unrehearsed yet ‘scaffolded’ situations to complement the more structured approaches common in foreign language lessons. It also builds on the language learned and practised in those lessons by providing alternative opportunities to develop a wide range of language skills, strategies and competences needed to function in everyday plurilingual situations. […] CLIL serves to reinforce the notion that language is a tool which to have meaning and sense needs to be activated in contexts which are motivating for and meaningful to our learners […]. The third principle is that CLIL should cognitively challenge learners - whatever their ability. It provides a setting rich for developing thinking skills in conjunction with both basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cognitive-academic language proficiency (CALP). Research suggests that these challenges encourage thinking to take place in different languages and at a deeper level of inter-cultural understanding involving both savoir faire and savoir être. The fourth principle embraces pluriculturality. Since language, thinking and culture are inextricably linked, then CLIL provides an ideal opportunity for students to operate in alternative cultures through studies in an alternative language. Studying a subject through the language of a different culture paves the way for understanding and tolerating different perspectives. The evolution of these four principles– the 4Cs - content, communication, cognition and culture/ citizenship - elevates CLIL to the position of major and significant contributor to the realisation of the European Commission’s Language Policy. They demand a timely revisioning of learning in general and language learning in particular in our schools.

Questi principi hanno ispirato costantemente ogni format di progettazione e hanno stimolato docenti e corsisti ad individuare le tassonomie cognitive più adeguate riflettendo sulle modalità con cui la lingua struttura i contenuti ai diversi livelli di complessità cognitiva. Le progettazioni messe in atto dai corsisti contengono numerosi esempi concreti, estremamente interessanti, di come si possano coniugare nei diversi stadi dell’apprendimento, i principi base del CLIL.

L’input ricco e comprensibile Nel CLIL il contenuto è il punto di partenza della progettazione, per così dire “trascina la lingua” ponendo l’accento sui significati; e l’uso veicolare della lingua tende a promuovere processi di acquisizione inconscia più che di apprendimento. Perché ciò avvenga, è necessario però che l’input abbia determinate caratteristiche, deve essere cioè comprensibile; la semplice esposizione alla lingua non è sufficiente, rilevante per l’apprendimento, organizzato secondo una progressione diversa da quella grammaticale.

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Per rendere l’input comprensibile, l’insegnante può intervenire adottando varie strategie. Innanzi tutto, può intervenire sul messaggio linguistico, a livello formale (ad esempio, mantenendo un ritmo rallentato, articolando in modo chiaro, utilizzando lessico di alta frequenza, uso molto basso di espressioni idiomatiche) e a livello interattivo, attraverso l’uso di strategie quali le “procedure di negoziazione” (Levinson 1980) in cui l’insegnante si accerterà della comprensione del messaggio trasmesso. Questi interventi sono riferiti alle situazioni in contesti di comunicazione orale. Cosa avviene quando l’input è sotto forma di testo scritto? Come evidenzia Coonan (2012: 149): La situazione dei testi scritti nell’ambito di un’esperienza CLIL è complessa e ne costituisce uno degli aspetti più problematici. I testi scelti possono essere scritti in lingua italiana oppure nella lingua veicolare prescelta. Tutte e due le opzioni hanno delle implicazioni metodologiche per la comprensione in LS.

Nel caso di scelta di testi in lingua italiana, si preclude il contatto con la lingua straniera e di conseguenza il potenziamento della competenza nella comprensione e produzione scritta. Nel caso di scelta di testi in LS ci si può scontrare con la difficoltà dello studente di capire sia se il testo è autentico, poiché in questo caso privo di accorgimenti linguistici e metodologici tali da facilitare il contenuto, sia che il testo sia tratto da materiale scolastico, poiché in questo caso il testo è rivolto a studenti madrelingua. Tuttavia, non è solo attraverso l’intervento sulla forma linguistica che l’input può essere reso comprensibile, ma anche attraverso interventi metodologici e didattici quali ad esempio la creazione di materiali di supporto o l’adozione di procedure metodologiche adatte. Una particolare attenzione è stata dunque rivolta alla ricerca dei materiali, al loro uso e alla loro didatizzazione. Stabiliti i principi teoricometodologici, i futuri docenti CLIL hanno individuato i materiali idonei a progettare in lingua veicolare e li hanno opportunamente adattati ai loro percorsi.

Il supporto all’apprendimento: lo “scaffolding” Il termine scaffolding è definito da Wood, Bruner e Ross (1976: 90) come “a process that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task, or achieve a goal which would be beyond his [or her] unassisted efforts” ed è legato alla nozione di “Zone of Proximal Development” (Zona di Sviluppo Prossimale) sviluppata da Vygotsky (1978: 86) che si riferisce a:

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the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.

Lo scaffolding, letteralmente "impalcatura", è quindi considerato un processo che consiste nel fornire un supporto e sostegno allo studente in modo da facilitarlo nello svolgimento di un compito, nell’apprendimento. Il fine ultimo di questo supporto è di rendere man mano l’apprendente indipendente, auto-apprendente e in grado di risolvere un problema. Man mano che la conoscenza e le competenze aumentano, l’insegnante ridurrà il supporto previsto. Nel CLIL strategie linguistiche e disciplinari si fondono e si integrano a vicenda. Durante il corso sono state messe in atto e opportunamente esemplificate tutte le tipologie di scaffolding. In primo luogo lo scaffolding verbale, attraverso il quale l’insegnante, consapevole del livello linguistico degli studenti, usa parafrasi, fornisce definizioni e modelli, formula domande allo scopo di stimolare processi cognitivi da parte dello studente. Questo ha implicato, nel corso, un’attenzione particolare all’uso della lingua, sia quella di apprendimento, specifica alla disciplina, sia quella per l’apprendimento, destinata a stimolare la comunicazione e l’interazione all’interno della classe. Anche l’organizzazione della classe (procedural scaffolding) ha una funzione importante: si è rilevato, in particolare, come i progetti CLIL nelle classi stimolino il lavoro collaborativo e la cooperazione in genere. Molto importanti si sono rivelate, infine, le strategie usate dall’insegnante per rappresentare e trasmettere il sapere (instructional scaffolding), l’uso di strumenti diversi da quelli verbali con cui è possibile rappresentare la conoscenza, quali visuals, tabelle, diagrammi e mappe concettuali. Queste ultime in particolare, già ampiamente utilizzate per alcune discipline in particolare, hanno il vantaggio di rendere evidenti legami, relazioni, rimandi senza ricorrere al linguaggio verbale, o ricorrendovi in misura minima. Anche di queste strategie, numerosi sono gli esempi creati nel corso.

Apprendimento attraverso “compiti” (task based) Nel CLIL le attività assumono un ruolo importante per la riuscita dell’apprendimento e per questo motivo devono essere considerate come building block. Secondo Doyle (1983) il curriculum deve prevedere delle attività, perché attraverso queste l’apprendente potrà acquisire delle

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informazioni, siano esse dati, concetti, e effettuare alle operazioni, quali memorizzare, analizzare tali informazioni. Il CLIL è particolarmente adatto a sviluppare competenze attraverso una didattica per compiti (task based), dove per compito si intende “un’attività che richiede agli studenti di usare la lingua, con accento particolare sul significato, allo scopo di raggiungere un obiettivo” (Ellis 2003: 4). La metodologia CLIL non esclude, tuttavia, tipologie più tradizionali di esercizi, quali cloze, labelling, matching, vero/falso volti a sviluppare conoscenze specifiche e parziali. Tabella 1. Tipologia di esercizi (in Coonan 2012: 182)       

-

Riconoscimento: riconoscere termini che appartengono tutti allo stesso processo; Matching: assegnare le didascalie giuste ai vari passi in una procedura; associare un termine ad una definizione data; Cloze: inserire le parole mancanti in un testo per dimostrare la comprensione di un evento, processo, ecc.; Selezione: scegliere un testo che meglio sintetizza un processo; Mettere in ordine: numerare i passi in una procedura; Completamento: finire la descrizione di un esperimento; Riorganizzazione: combinare delle frasi (paragrafi) fra di loro per creare un testo accettabile dal punto di vista del contenuto (per tipo testuale; per genere; per contenuto); Rispondere a domande; Scelte multiple/vero o falso: si motivano le risposte scelte

La riflessione condotta nel corso ha stimolato la consapevolezza nell’uso degli uni e degli altri nelle diverse fasi del percorso e la realizzazione, da parte dei docenti corsisti, di unità di apprendimento corredate da attività, come richiesto per il modulo 5, adeguatamente scelte.

Punti di forza e debolezze del corso La realizzazione del corso di perfezionamento rivolto ai docenti della Scuola è stata resa possibile dall’approccio misto, “blended”, con il quale è stato concepito. La sovrapposizione degli impegni didattici e amministrativi dei docenti di scuola limita la disponibilità alla frequenza nel senso tradizionale del termine. Oltre tutto bisogna pensare che tale Corso aveva come utenza docenti provenienti da ogni parte del Piemonte.

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L’introduzione di modalità in ambiente e-learning aumentano quindi la possibilità di partecipazione al Corso e l’interazione, anche se in modalità asincrona. Comunque, la frequenza, in orari pomeridiani, a porzioni di moduli, ha consentito ai docenti corsisti di farne momenti di discussione, approfondimento e chiarimento. D’altra parte, l’Università, attraverso il CLA-UniTO, ha potuto, nonostante la complessità degli aspetti organizzativi e logistici derivanti dalle attività accademiche in svolgimento, avviare il Corso di perfezionamento insieme al CLAT dell’Università di Genova e dare avvio a questa formazione sperimentale con l’ottica di continuare e di farlo nel migliore dei modi. Per questo motivo, a conclusione del Corso è stato proposto un questionario di valutazione congiuntamente elaborato e reso disponibile online. I corsisti che hanno accolto la richiesta di compilare il questionario sono stati 46 su 84, di cui 37 per il Piemonte e 9 per la Liguria.12 La domanda 2 è stata formulata tenendo conto che a Torino si sono presentati docenti con la lingua tedesca e spagnola come lingua veicolare. Per non venir meno a quanto il CLA-UniTO si è sempre riproposto, secondo i principi dell’Unione Europea, in materia di politica linguistica e plurilinguismo, i docenti sono stati ammessi alla frequenza del corso purché in grado di dimostrare la competenza B2, almeno in una delle due lingue che il decreto prevedeva per il corso attivato nell’Università di Torino, quindi inglese e francese. Per le Domande: -

3 “I contenuti del corso sono congruenti con gli obiettivi?” 4 “L’approccio metodologico proposto (blended learning) ha una ricaduta efficace sulla pratica didattica?” 5 “La scansione temporale delle attività didattiche è funzionale all’apprendimento della metodologia CLIL” 6 “Gli incontri in presenza hanno favorito la comprensione degli argomenti teorici proposti?” e 7 “L’integrazione tra attività a distanza e attività in presenza è stata utile per la gestione del tempo?”

si riporta qui di seguito il grafico riassuntivo delle risposte date.

12

I corsisti iscritti al Corso presso il CLAT dell’Università di Genova che hanno sostenuto l'esame finale sono stati 18, mentre quelli iscritti presso CLA-UniTO dell’Università di Torino che hanno sostenuto l'esame finale sono stati 76.

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Grafico 1. Risposte si/no alle Domande 3, 4, 5, 6 e 7 del Questionario

Come risulta, i docenti corsisti hanno espresso globalmente un giudizio positivo alle domande poste. Per quanto riguarda la Domanda 8 “Eventuali commenti”, 18 docenti corsisti hanno risposto fornendo indicazioni relative alla realizzazione del corso in termini di avvio e scansione temporale. La collocazione del corso a febbraio ha reso loro difficile l’inserimento di una unità didattica a corsi già avviati e l’organizzazione di un’esperienza di tirocinio in modo più congruo e consapevole e mettere al meglio in pratica gli input ricevuti durante il corso. Alcuni hanno suggerito una scansione temporale lungo tutto l’arco dell’anno scolastico in modo da meglio inserire scadenze di consegne senza sovrapposizioni con le attività scolastiche relative soprattutto agli scrutini. Altri hanno proposto maggiori incontri in presenza per un modulo sulle tecnologie per aiutare chi ha grosse difficoltà nell’uso di strumenti informatici. Di fatto, il Modulo 6 del Corso si è svolto tutto online con l’idea che le tecnologie dovessero accompagnare il resto delle nozioni ed essere man mano applicate per lo svolgimento di compiti e attività. Le Domande dalla 9 alla 18 sono state riproposte per ciascun modulo e avevano come scopo di fornire informazioni riguardo all’esposizione dei contenuti, alle attività proposte, agli obiettivi, alla valutazione e feedback fornito con la correzione dei compiti di fine modulo. Le risposte fornite mostrano un apprezzamento generale per la didattica svolta. Il Grafico 2 mostra i risultati delle risposte fornite per le Domande:

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19. Aveva mai seguito una formazione in cui si facesse uso delle Nuove tecnologie (TIC) 20. Aveva mai avuto occasione di lavorare in Rete su una piattaforma? 22. Era già in grado di utilizzare gli strumenti della piattaforma? 23. Pensa che le sue competenze informatiche siano migliorate durante il corso?

Grafico 2. Risposte si/no alle Domande 19, 20, 22, 23

La lettura dei dati mostra, globalmente, che poco meno del numero dei docenti che ha risposto aveva precedentemente seguito un corso che facesse uso delle nuove tecnologie ed in particolare di una piattaforma elearning. In ogni caso, come risulta evidente nel Grafico 2, tutti i docenti ritengono che le competenze informatiche abbiano tratto benefici dalla frequenza a questo corso. Sempre per quanto riguarda le tecnologie ed in particolare l’uso di una piattaforma (Domanda 21), i docenti corsisti hanno trovato utile l’uso del forum, del trasferimento documenti e, in qualche caso, anche quello della posta interna. Inoltre, per le attività didattiche future, la maggior parte dei docenti ritiene che utilizzerà soprattutto i Wiki, e i Blog (Domanda 24). Le ultime due domande del questionario hanno riguardato la valutazione sulla presenza dei tutor. A parte un astenuto 38 docenti hanno valutato sufficiente la presenza dei tutor durante il percorso formativo e sono solo 15 risposte positive inerenti alla sua funzione di facilitatore. Tuttavia, nonostante il numero di risposte negative, nella seguente e ultima

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domanda (Domanda 28. “Eventuali commenti”) non sono state fornite precisazioni a riguardo delle risposte negative.

Conclusioni Come è emerso dall’analisi delle risposte del questionario sottoposto ai docenti corsisti, il Corso ha ricevuto una valutazione positiva. Tuttavia, una riflessione si rende necessaria come punto di partenza per l’avvio di futuri corsi. A questo proposito, alcune risposte fornite nel questionario, gli scambi avvenuti durante le sessioni in praesentia, e le riunioni periodiche dei docenti formatori costituiscono materiale utile. Una prima riflessione riguarda l’attenzione posta dal Ministero sulle tecnologie. Quanto attuato nel corso è in totale sintonia, ma è opportuno considerare le competenze iniziali dei docenti che si iscrivono al corso. Spesso queste sono di base e possono richiedere laboratori presenziali in cui fornire supporto diretto ai docenti in difficoltà. Inoltre, un posizionamento del modulo a inizio corso metterebbe i docenti corsisti in condizione di aver acquisito delle competenze che potranno ulteriormente sviluppare e utilizzare nella realizzazione dei compiti assegnati. Un’altra riflessione riguarda le competenze linguistiche che seppur documentate come di livello pari o superiore al B2 sono riferite alla comunicazione quotidiana e non a quella scientifica, le cui caratteristiche richiedono competenze inerenti al genere così come si realizza nella lingua straniera. Per fornire tali competenze, alcuni moduli potrebbero prevedere attività mirate alla comunicazione disciplinare attraverso l’analisi di testi in lingua straniera su vari livelli: retorico, pragmatico, sintattico, grammaticale e lessicale. Il corso ha messo alla luce alcune situazioni di complessa gestione. Di fatto, per alcuni docenti iscritti al corso, la propria materia non è risultata fra quelle in cui è previsto l’insegnamento nella lingua straniera nella scuola presso la quale prestano servizio. Tali situazioni hanno creato delle problematiche al momento previsto per l’inizio dello svolgimento del tirocinio. In alcuni casi questo si è svolto in altre sezioni della scuola sede di lavoro e in alcuni addirittura in altre scuole. La gestione del tirocinio è stata difficoltosa e rallentata anche a causa delle riserve dimostrate dai dirigenti scolastici, che non sempre hanno consentito in modo agevole lo spostamento del docente corsista per ragioni legate alla necessità di provvederne la sostituzione. Tuttavia, grazie alle sinergie dei due atenei, all’impegno profuso e alla continua attenzione sulle contingenze, è stato possibile con successo condurre e portare a termine il corso di perfezionamento. La valutazione

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finale organizzata sotto forma di colloquio ha richiesto ai corsisti ammessi all’esame finale la riflessione su aspetti applicativi metodologicodisciplinari legate alle attività di tirocinio e la presentazione di un prodotto multimediale creato attraverso l’uso delle tecnologie (TIC) per l’insegnamento di una disciplina con metodologia CLIL.

Bibliografia Barbero T. 2012. Intégrer compétences cognitives et communicatives dans CLIL/EMILE. Synergies Italie 8: 141-148. Barbero T. / A.T. Damascelli / M-B Vittoz 2009. Integrating the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) with CLIL. CLIL Practice: Perspectives from the Field. Disponibile all’indirizzo http://www.icpj.eu/. Clegg J. (senza data). Providing language support in CLIL. Disponibile all’indirizzo http://factworld.info/journal/issue06/f6-clegg.pdf. Commissione Europea 1995. White Paper on Education and Training. Disponibile all’indirizzo http://europa.eu/documents/comm/white_papers/pdf/com95_590_en.pdf. Coonan C. M. 2012. La lingua straniera veicolare. Torino: UTET. Coyle D. / P. Hood / D. Marsh 2010. CLIL. Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dale L. / R. Tanner 2012. CLIL Activities. A Resource for Subject and Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalton-Puffer C. 2007. Discourse in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Classrooms Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Damascelli A.T. 2012. Le CLIL comme stratégie pour apprendre les disciplines et comprendre les cultures. Synergies Italie 8 : 93-101. Doyle W. 1983. Academic work. Review of Educational Research 53/1: 159-199. Ellis R. 2003. Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Järvinen H M. (a cura di) 2009. Language in Content Instruction. Università di Turku, Finlandia. Disponibile all’indirizzo http://lici.utu.fi/materials/LICI_Handbook_EN.pdf. Kottelat P. 2012. Interculturel et CLIL, entre théorie et pratique, quelques pistes pédagogiques. Synergies Italie 8: 69-77. Lasagabaster D. 2008. Foreign language competence in Content and Language Integrated Courses. The Open Applied Linguistics Journal 1: 31-42.

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Levinson S. 1980. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Llinares A. / T. Morton / R. Whittaker 2012. The Roles of Language in CLIL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsh D. 2001. CLIL/EMILE. The European dimension. Actions, Trends and Foresight Potential, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Disponibile all’indirizzo http://clil-cd.ecml.at/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ekwp4udVLfQ%3D& tabid=947&language=en-GB. Mehisto P. / D. Marsh / M.J. Frigols 2008, Uncovering CLIL. Content and language Integrated Learning in Bilingual and Multilingual Education. Oxford: Macmillan. Vygotsky L.S. 1978. Interaction between learning and development. In M. Cole / V. John-Steiner / S. Scribner / E. Souberman (eds), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 79-91. Wood D. / J.S. Bruner / R. Gail 1976. The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 17/2: 89-100.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN VEHICULAR ENGLISH: OILING THE WHEELS, NOT BUILDING THE ENGINE RITA BENNETT UNIVERSITY OF SALENTO, ITALY

Introduction to the study: form and aims This paper describes a case study undertaken as part of a wider doctoral study at a southern Italian University. It is set against the background of the increasing internationalisation in education that has led to an increasing number of university courses, especially at higher level, being given in English around the world. The wider study was aimed at examining the linguistic challenges faced by the providers and consumers of these courses and discussing what types of action from language practitioners could be useful in helping them to meet those challenges. The case study described is of an English-medium module of a second level (Magistrale) engineering course on control systems. It was planned in two phases spread over two academic years, so that while the subject matter was the same for each year, a different group of students attended. The number of students attending each individual teaching session was between 16 and 23. Student profiles were not collected but students were all young adults of no more than thirty years. The general plan of the case study was to observe linguistic behaviour in lectures and trial some linguistic intervention. This paper describes the findings of the observations and how linguistic intervention in the first phase was used to inform that of the second phase. The description of the second year is augmented by the inclusion of relevant details of two much smaller scale observations of similar courses at the same level. These were undertaken specifically to provide a

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comparison to the central observed course. The views of both instructors and students are also considered. The timing of the study, at a moment of widespread economic difficulty, was highly relevant. There was no question of ‘building an engine’, in the sense of putting into place extra levels of linguistic help. Rather, it was a matter of finding ways to ‘oil the wheels’, to make vehicular English run more smoothly and efficiently.

The study background: internationalisation and EMI Internationalisation in this context is taken to mean a deliberate movement to open up university courses to include students, lecturers and educational material from outside the host country. While the EU in its Leuven communiqué (2009) continues to encourage ‘linguistic pluralism’ its call to ‘increase mobility’ for students is being most practically answered by instituting tertiary vehicular English or EMI (English as Medium of Instruction) programmes. The recent struggle of the Politecnico di Milano with the courts over the decision to give all of its Masters (Magistrale) courses from 2014 in English is an example of this (see La Repubblica, 4 June 2013). EMI has the economic advantage of bringing in students from other countries as well as the educational one of broadening local students’ outlook while better preparing them for the global workplace. However, given the difficulties of operating in a language which is not one’s own, it cannot be assumed that English-Medium Instruction is universally popular. Indeed, even those who welcome internationalisation through EMI as a concept may well be less than enthusiastic when it comes to its implementation. There are almost certain to be fears, discussed by Georgiou (2012), that imperfect understanding and/or linguistic delivery will dilute the quality of the educational product. In addition, for less prestigious institutions, the difficulty of attracting foreign students could result in a situation where most, or even all, of the students share an L1 with the teacher. Consequently L2 interaction is unnatural and there is a constant temptation to drift back into L1. This temptation is naturally stronger where the L2 of participants is weak. Lapsing into L1 in turn perpetuates the disincentive to students from outside, while students from within the area may feel they have to put a higher level of effort into their courses with little compensatory gain. To continue the mechanical metaphor, consideration needs to be given as to how useful it is to keep the vehicle of L2 interaction in motion and how doing this can be achieved.

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Case study. First year Initial phase Both for considering how L2 might impact on the effectiveness of instruction and for deciding how to structure auxiliary linguistic help it was thought necessary to set out a list of relevant factors. This is given below in table form. Factor

Condition

Students’ level of subject knowledge Teacher’s level of English Students’ level of English Foreign students Subject Resources

Higher degree C1 Unknown at outset, B1? None Engineering Assumed as minimal

Table 1. Factors considered relevant to case study In terms of resources it was assumed that in the present climate these are, and will continue to be, minimal and should be applied as economically as possible. The study itself, however, provided temporary linguistic help for trial purposes. The nature of the subject and the level at which it was being studied indicated the likelihood of the presence of subject-specific formulas conducive, because of their familiarity to students, to greater comprehensibility. Some models which could provide whole or partial linguistic solutions have been commonly suggested to be appointing NS (native speaker) subject teachers, separate language courses, adjunct language courses, CLIL and team teaching. Each of these is discussed below with reference to the courses in the study. A NS teacher was never considered for this study but it is worth mentioning that the idea of a NS subject teacher being optimal has now been widely discredited. There is a danger that insufficient sensitivity to linguistic issues will lead them to speak too quickly or too idiomatically, factors which have been found to have potentially serious negative aspects on student comprehension (Vinke 1995). In addition, Kramsch (1997) has shown that in contexts where the majority of students share an L1 with the lecturer, s/he will better understand their language problems. However, while this could improve the content profit for students, it could also lull them into a false sense of security regarding their ability in L2. Also, with no foreign students present the danger of L1 lapsing is naturally high.

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Obviously separate language courses would be positive but they would have to be ongoing for each group of students and consequently too costly to maintain. Students do, for a fee, have access to general language courses at the University Language Centre. There are also some courses provided within the faculties, each of which has an English language assistant. These courses may or may not be in the general subject area but are necessarily non-course-specific and usually regarded as insufficient in number. The remaining options – adjunct language courses, CLIL methodology and team teaching – were therefore those considered for use in the wider study. While CLIL methodology and team teaching was chosen for a second, separate course in the study, an adjunct language course was chosen for the case study under discussion. The rationale for these decisions was that the subject teacher was highly competent in English. He had taught this course before in English and was understandably not interested in revising it, either for using CLIL methodology or to include a team teacher. Two further reasons existed for opting for an adjunct course: first it provided a different path from the second case study and its independent nature meant it could be better moulded to student need as it progressed.

First year plan It was intended that lectures be observed for around 10 hours to analyse linguistic behaviour. At the same time students would be offered one hour per week of English as part of the study to take place before one of the thrice-weekly lectures. The ultimate aim was to ascertain from both of these sources what type of linguistic help might be appropriate for this course, partly for the current year but more particularly for courses with similar profiles in future years. The tutor reported that he was much in favour of teaching in English because he thought it would be helpful for students’ future careers. However he recognised that in a situation where all students were Italian, L2 communication would seem artificial. He felt that the presence of at least one non-L1 Italian student would have rendered the proceedings more natural. Most significantly, though, he feared that giving the course entirely in English might prejudice the students’ ability to grasp the content of the course. He naturally considered this to be of prime importance. One further point is worthy of mention here. During the course the professor reported that despite the fact that he was not an L1 speaker of

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English he nevertheless felt more comfortable using English when explaining and discussing matters related to Engineering. This is a strong indication that he was a member of what Swales (1990) describes as a ‘discourse community’,1 and explains his opinion that learning through English could help students in their future careers.

First year observations: delivery The main points noted regarding the instructor’s linguistic delivery were as follows: x x x x x x

clear and accurate English little use of idiom high quantity of visual input (formulas usually also verbalised) frequent use of linguistic chunks inclusive style encouraging participation leniency to L1 use by students.

The conditions described above – specifically, high quality of delivery, presence of formulaic language, visual aids, inclusive nature of lectures, initiating, and allowing students to initiate, concept checks – are all positive indications of high comprehensibility (Vinke 1995). Student reluctance to risk L2 interventions was seen as a negative factor in terms of their entering a ‘discourse community’. However, it cannot be concluded that leniency to L1 use contributed to this since an opposite stance might have resulted in zero participation.

First year observations: linguistic behaviour Below is a summary of the main points noted regarding linguistic behaviour during the lectures. x x x x

1

delivery in L2 code-switching to L1 almost exclusively student-led code-switching to L2 almost exclusively teacher-led teacher accepts L1 comments and questions usually responding in L1

Broadly speaking a discourse community is one which uses specific language to communicate in a specific domain.

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x teacher frequently sums up in L1 x L2 student interventions rare in early lectures improving to ratio of 1.2 in last two observed lectures x adjunct course attendees more likely to use L2. It had been stated by the professor at the introductory meeting that it was hoped that students would participate in English but that L1 was not forbidden. The professor seemed to assume that failure to understand was a linguistic problem as his general tactic was to respond to L1 questions in L1 and then continue in that language for varying lengths of time. He told the author that he wanted to be absolutely sure that they understood. The fact that adjunct course students used L2 more than others was not necessarily indicative of the success of that course as it could have been the case that only those more interested in or better at English had chosen to attend. A couple of interesting points could be added here to help interpret what was behind linguistic choices during the lectures. The professor told the observer that at the beginning of each lecture he invites questions about the previous lecture and he rightfully suggested that it could aid the L2 participatory aspect of the course if these questions were prepared in English. At an adjunct lesson the students had reported to the observer that the previous (unobserved) lecture was difficult and they prepared questions on it in English. However, evidently mindful of the difficulties experienced by students in the previous session, the lecturer began by inviting questions in Italian. Those questions which had been prepared in English were then asked in Italian. This was very revealing as it appears to suggest that students did not feel empowered to initiate in English. Either they did not feel permitted to switch codes away from the professor or they felt it would be pretentious to do so in front of their colleagues. Of course it should also be borne in mind here that, not yet being members of the discourse community, asking in L1 is the easier option for them. A particular linguistic exchange from a later observation was also revealing in showing how the lecturer attempts to deflect reversions to L1.

ENG(T)-IT(S1)-ENG(T)-IT(S1)-IT(T)-IT(S1)-IT(S2)-ENG(T) The teacher tries to insist on English by responding to the student’s Italian intervention in English. When the student continues in Italian he gives up and responds in Italian. However, when a second student joins in in Italian, he tries to pull the dialogue back to English.

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First year observations: conclusions on linguistic exchanges Unsurprisingly, students were more comfortable using Italian. Because the professor was concerned that students might not fully understand content he was prepared to respond to Italian questions in Italian. However, the assumption that it was language that was preventing understanding may not have been correct. In addition, while switching to L1 may ensure that the lecturer is understood linguistically, it could also create a habit of inattention in the students, who are safe in the knowledge that content will later be available in L1 for easy assimilation. The fact that students were happy to code-switch the dialogue from English to Italian but almost never switched from Italian to English shows their strong reluctance to initiate English dialogue. Ease of expression is sure to play a part in this, but it is also likely that they were intimidated by those factors which are well-known to inhibit speech in L2, fear of error or of looking ‘silly’, or seeming pretentious in front of peers. This former phenomenon has been described as ‘Foreign Language anxiety’(FLA) and has been the subject of several studies, for example Occhipinti (2009). It was shown in this study that exposure to L2 environments decreases FLA which therefore suggests that persistence in L2 could be positive rather than negative in this regard. Assuming that there is no problem with delivery, as was the case here, and that L2 acquisition is an aim of the course, three things could help here. Firstly, it could be established that students were at an L2 level at which they are able to sufficiently understand a familiar subject in that L2. Secondly some form of linguistic help could be provided in accordance with the types of linguistic demands that the course would make. In this way students could extract maximum profit from lessons. Thirdly, teachers might consider being stricter about maintaining the dialogue in English thereby cultivating a culture of effort towards understanding and communicating in L2 which would almost certainly repay with amelioration in language ability. These conclusions presuppose not only the more obvious desirability that the lecture be understood but also the less obvious one that it be inclusive and that students should take an active part. While student participation helps lecturers by informing them to what extent their audience are following the arguments, it also aids the students’ learning processes. Ting (2010) discusses more recent neurological studies that show that Hebbian’s already well-accepted 1949 theory – that repeated action causes changes to the brain which increase efficiency in that area – to be true. This is no surprise as experience tells us that practice improves performance. This connection between active learning and knowledge

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acquisition is assumed throughout this paper as well as in the main study which it is a part of.

First year adjunct course This course was voluntary and was not well attended from the start (about a third of students). It started with predictable functional language for participating in lessons such as question-making, negotiating meaning and making reference to the board or screen. It went on to include formulaic language and frequently used grammatical structures observed in the lectures. It has already been mentioned that it was noticeable that attendees of this course were more likely to participate in the lessons and it could be added that they were observed to be using language covered in the course. This was taken as an indication that the lessons were useful, but as no formal control was made of this or of the remaining students this could not be verified. It was agreed, however, that this type of course, informed in its content by the present year’s trial, would be repeated in some form in the second year of the study.

Case study. Second year Form and aims Results from the first year study were collated and used to shape the format of the second stage of the study. The general plan was as follows and its rationale is described below: x language ability to be measured at start x three language lessons in first two weeks of course to cover language for participation, question making, referencing, hypothesis x worksheets on above topics with explanations and exercises (English/Italian) x worksheet and sound file on formulas to be co-produced by professor and language practitioner x emphasis to be placed on importance of English language for future careers x further and parallel observations x diaries/questionnaires.

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It is common in many institutions to insist that students on EMI courses have a certificated minimum level of language. It would be useful to know the L2 level of the students in our study, both in terms of how many of them would have been eligible had such a barrier been in place and in terms of how they actually managed in the course. Only three language lessons were planned to be as near to the beginning of the course as possible. The idea here was that students should benefit from their intended improved and targeted ability with English from the start and establish a culture of L2 participation. The limited number of lessons was in line with considerations for minimising strain on existing resources by focusing on most needed structures and functions. They were to be backed up by worksheets explaining these functions and structures, and exercises practising them. The rationale for the worksheets was that they could be added to or altered in subsequent years and be always available at virtually no cost to teaching resources. Since this particular discipline relied heavily on formulas, it was thought essential in terms of ‘discourse community’ that students could verbalise formulas and recognise verbalised forms of them as well as produce them in written form or be able to read them. If a subject teacher could provide sound files of formulas matched with written versions a language teacher could use them in class or devise worksheets for student training. To counteract any idea that the language element was a kind of optional extra, the subject teacher would continue to emphasise the essential nature of a knowledge of English in today’s workplace in the students’ discipline. It was to be explicitly pointed out that an L2 course was offered to give them an opportunity of improvement in this area. It was hoped that they would be thereby encouraged to use L2 in their lessons. The lesson observations from year one had given some interesting insights into how students and teacher were using L2 and it was therefore decided to do four observations in the second year, spaced out over the period of the course. In addition, it was decided to carry out some observations on similar courses being held in English to provide a comparison. In order to gain an idea of the students’ perspective on EMI it was intended that the students on the course at the centre of the study would complete a brief lesson-by-lesson diary on their linguistic experience of studying through L2. A questionnaire was to be devised for students on parallel observed courses.

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Second year language levels As can be seen from the chart below, levels improved during the course. Since the test was taken anonymously it could not be seen whether one specific level benefited more than others. However it can be seen that even if it is speculated that all of the absent students began at A2 level there is still an upward trend in the remaining students.

Course start Course end

TOTAL

A2

B1

B2

23 19

10 3

10 11

3 5

Table 2. Student L2 levels

Second year observations: linguistic behaviour The first observation was of the introductory session which turned out to be mostly in Italian. The main points from observations two and three are shown in Table 3 below while a more detailed breakdown of observation four is given in Table 4.

Observation 2 LENGTH OF OBSERVATION STUDENT QUESTIONS & INTERVENTIONS IN ENGLISH STUDENT RESPONSES IN ENGLISH STUDENT QUESTIONS & INTERVENTIONS IN ITALIAN STUDENT RESPONSES IN ITALIAN PROFESSOR RESPONSES IN ITALIAN ITALIAN SUMMARIES BY PROFESSOR

Observation 3

35 MINS 2

120 MINS 12

4

4

2

8

NONE

5 (TO L1 Q)

2

7

NONE

3

Table 3. Linguistic interaction A At the preliminary meeting the content teacher strongly underlined the importance and benefits of participating in English. It can be seen from Table 3 that students were attempting to participate in English but were

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also prepared to ask questions or make comments in Italian. In most cases, all but one in fact, they were rewarded with a response in Italian. The Italian summaries given during observation three indicate that the teacher was concerned about student comprehension. It is interesting that while students were prepared to initiate in L1 it was observed that they were much more reluctant to respond to frequent L2 questions in L1. Again it could be assumed that the teacher interpreted this as a comprehension problem, but an L2 production problem together with a reluctance to codeswitch when answering could also have been an explanation. To further investigate this, a different method of data recording was employed for the final observation as shown below in Table 4. L2 INITIATIONS

L1 INITIATIONS

1 2

P P

P

3 4

P

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

P P P

L2 RESPONSES

L1 RESPONSES

S (1 WORD) S CONT.EXCHANGE

18 19

P, P

P P EXPLANATION S (1 WORD) S (1 WORD) S (1 WORD) P SUMMARY ‘RAGAZZI’ P S

P P P

S P S (1 WORD) S (1 WORD) S (1 WORD)

S S P, P

P P

‘RAGAZZI’

S P SUMMARY

S MINIMAL RESPONSE P

Table 4. Linguistic interaction B Each line refers to a point in the lecture, given in L2, when either the professor ‘P’ invites a contribution from the students or a student ‘S’

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intervenes with a comment or question. It can be seen that students are reluctant to code-switch to L1 but that their utterances in L2 are minimal. Only one student utterance, the initiation in line 16, extends beyond one word. The professor answers all three L1 questions in L1 but nevertheless his attempts to maintain L2 can be seen, most especially in lines 9 and 17. In both cases he receives no answer to his L2 question and he rephrases it in L2. Still receiving no answer he appeals with ‘ragazzi’ – ‘guys’. This appears to be giving permission for an L1 response without resorting to an L1 translation. His fear that they have not understood for linguistic reasons is shown by the fact that he gives his summaries and explanations – lines 4, 8 and 19 – in L1.

Adjunct English input The adjunct course consisted of three sessions with contents as detailed in the second year plan. The first session took place after the introduction to the course and prior to the first lesson. All students attended. For logistical reasons the second and third sessions were given together in a 90-minute lesson following on (after a short break) from the third content lesson (second observation). Just less than half of the students returned for this. While it is true that they may have had buses to catch etc., it is probable that a number of them did not consider that the sessions would be sufficiently useful to be worth making an extra effort to attend. Worksheets covering the subjects of the session were sent by the content teacher to students’ mailboxes and answers to exercises followed a week later.

Parallel observations Three sets of parallel observations were made: x Second level computer engineering x Second level engineering x Second level economics These were chosen purely on the basis of opportunity as it was difficult to find courses which fulfilled the three conditions of L2 being actually used, willingness by the content teacher to be observed and feasibility of lesson timing. The parallel engineering course, however, will not be discussed here as only around 50% of it was given in English. A summary of relevant features of the remaining courses is given in Table 5 below.

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ECONOMICS

COMPUTER ENGINEERING

Three foreign students present

Two foreign students present

Professor sums up at intervals in Italian and answers questions (two only, Italian) in Italian. When summing up in Italian translates salient points into English. Inclusive style and visual elements. Of 23 English questions from professor, 10 answered in Italian, seven in English (including three oneword and two foreign students.) Three receive no answer and three answered by the professor. himself. Few spontaneous student utterances. Foreign students also participate

Professor speaks only English and sometimes translates Italian student questions and answers into English. Inclusive style and visual presentation.

Italian students (one exception) speak almost exclusively Italian. Despite this, exchanges have natural feel. Foreign students say nothing.

Table 5. Parallel observations: linguistic features The content teacher from the main study had expressed the desire to have some foreign students in his group in order to make his use of L2 less ‘artificial’. Both of the parallel groups contained non-Italian native speakers and it is interesting to see how this affected the way that classes were conducted. Linguistic exchanges in the Economics group were similar to those in the central case study group. In other words, despite the presence of nonL1 Italians the teacher frequently answered L1 questions in L1 and used L1 to sum up from time to time. He did, however, translate salient points from his summing up into English. About a third of his L2 questions were answered by students in L2 but often, where Italian students were involved, with one word. Although the teacher in the computer engineering group spoke exclusively in English, he did not receive like responses. On the contrary, apart from one valiant Italian, all of the frequent student responses and interventions were in Italian. In most cases the teacher translated these into English before responding to them also in English. What was extraordinary about this proceeding was its extremely natural flow. It was as though the students’ linguistic behaviour had been fossilised into one language for reception and another for production.

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Student feedback Students on the main study course did not complete diaries as hoped and a questionnaire was therefore designed. Some questions were common to those asked on the parallel observation course questionnaires. Results regarding the use of English over the three courses are shown in Table 6 below. Comp. Eng.

Economics

Case study

I expect to use English in my future career English will be very important to me English will be quite important to me

100%

88%

100%

n.a. n.a.

n.a. n.a.

70% 30%

I was VERY or QUITE worried I wouldn’t understand I was NOT VERY or NOT AT ALL worried I wouldn’t understand

36%

73%

60%

64%

27%

40%

The course is very difficult for me because of the language The language makes no difference to my understanding I can understand but I can’t respond in English I was surprised by how much I can understand

14%

15%

n.a.

14%

19%

n.a.

43%

38%

n.a.

21%

23%

n.a.

I don’t use English because I’m not sure how to construct or pronounce what I want to say (those who did not participate) I use Italian simply because I can express myself better

79%

77%

75%

21%

23%

25%

The professor summing up in Italian is essential The professor summing up in Italian is useful The professor summing up in Italian is not necessary

n.a.

31%

40%

n.a.

57%

55%

n.a.

12%

5%

Table 6. Student questionnaires

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It can be seen that the vast majority of students thought they would use English in their future careers, although of those asked only 70% saw it as being ‘very important’. There is a notable difference in the pre-course apprehensions of the different groups. This may be explained by two comments from the less concerned group that they believed the professor would clarify in Italian. In the event, it can be seen that their experiences of difficulty were similar. In fact reported levels of understanding were high (85-86%) with little difference between the courses with and without L1 concept checks and summaries. Despite this, around a third of students who experienced it believed that L1 summing up by the professor was essential. It could be speculated that an L2 summing up might also have been effective in some or many cases. The most noticeable feature of the result was that it was difficulty of production which most often prevented student L2 participation. One further comment from an international student is relevant. She said that she did not participate because other students were speaking Italian and she was not that good at it. Even though her teacher spoke exclusively English she was still inhibited about joining in. If this were to indicate typical behaviour – and the observed non-participation of the second non-Italian student may indicate this – it would need to be taken into consideration when permitting L1 use. The case study questionnaire revealed that 75% of attendees of the adjunct course had found it useful, while only 66% of those who used them were positive about the worksheets. Among the comments added were that it would be useful to have: x x x x

more English before the course technical English more grammar only sessions on question making and participating.

Content teacher feedback Three professors who taught their courses in English were interviewed in depth, the main study professor, the professor from the parallel computer engineering observed course and one further engineering professor teaching for the first time partially in English. A transcript made of the interviews was analysed and some pertinent points are given in Table 7 below.

284 Aspect of EMI discussed Benefits of EMI courses to university

Benefits of EMI courses to students

Disadvantages to University

Chapter Fourteen Engineering Attracts foreign students Creates international environment Opens students’ minds. To work in engineering, fluency in English is fundamental. None

Disadvantages to students

A bit ‘fake’ if no foreign students. Can be more difficult to learn

More time needed

Not really. Arguments need to be repeated anyway Sometimes used to ensure understanding. (100% Italian students) Allowed. Fear making mistakes Not usually clear

Attitudes to L1 use by teacher

Attitudes to L1 use by students Are students’ linguistic and content problems distinguishable? Should there be a language condition for acceptance on EMI courses?

Favourable. Good intermediate (B2) There is an existing condition but seems too low.

Table 7. Content teacher interviews

Comp. Engineering Attracts foreign students

Engineering. (Partial EMI) Attracts foreign students

Familiarity with English is essential in the job market at home and abroad. None

Entering mentally into a mechanism where English is now crucial Might cause some home students to go elsewhere Have to work harder for same result. Some info may be missed. Yes I repeat concepts more times and speak more slowly. Useful. Teacher’s job is teaching subject, not English. Fine. It’s the norm. Not always. I judge from difficulty of concept and of language. No. Would be useful. B2 would be good start BUT imposing condition could lose us students.

Extra effort needed to follow. Level of comprehension may be reduced. No

Hardly ever. I accept L1 questions and comments. Accepted. They should be at ease. No. Generally it’s both. A difficult concept is even more difficult in English Could work. Present is usually insufficient, but things improving. Cannot exclude students in present climate.

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It can be seen that the content practitioners interviewed were convinced of the benefits to both university and students of EMI courses but had reservations to varying degrees. While it was acceptable that students would have to work harder there was a fear that learning might be compromised. This fear led to high tolerance to student L1 use and, since it is difficult to separate linguistic and concept problems, a possibly excessive use of L1 by the teacher.2 Their high tolerance of L1 also suggests that they did not value highly the link between active use of a language and its acquisition. A further reservation was linked to present economic conditions. Student numbers are falling and it was seen as important not to risk further discouraging enrolment. While all interviewees believed that EMI would be more effective if there were a language condition and that the prevailing condition of ‘idoneità’3 was insufficient, it was thought that imposing a stricter, more specific condition could affect enrolment and thereby threaten course viability.

Recommendations Entry level Since it was agreed that L2 ability level does – and did in our study – contribute to the sustainability or otherwise of maintaining L2, a minimum entry level should be set. This would reassure teachers that students were capable of following in L2 and could reduce the need to resort to L1. Bearing in mind the reservations expressed by some teachers that this proceeding would reduce numbers to the point of threatening course viability, the level could remain comparatively low for the time being, say B1. In fact all students should be at this level when entering university and as Italian schools introduce CLIL teaching to an ever greater extent (Eurydice 2012: 40) it can be expected that in the near future this could be increased to B2. The entry condition for a similar course (Masters) in the United Kingdom would be around an IELTS 6.5 (equivalent to a good B2 or low C1.) In addition to providing evidence of linguistic ability, it would be useful for all potential students to take a standard entry level test. This would allow subject teachers to make decisions regarding to what extent they may need to check understanding at the linguistic level, and in the 2

Not in the case of the central column where L1 was almost never used by the professor. 3 Eligibility, in practice largely undefined.

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case of a universally high ability it could allow them to dispense with linguistic help entirely.

Use of L1 While it has been shown that ‘trans-languaging’, that is, in-course scaffolding through L1, can be helpful to L2 acquisition in EMI courses,4 it is difficult to see how this can be justified where it is intended that students with different L1s are present. In addition, if it is accepted that it is beneficial to students to become part of a discourse community and that producing L2 in itself promotes learning, an ideal situation would be that neither teacher nor students should speak in any language other than the L2 target language, English. In our study area when domestic students leave the EMI classroom they return to their normal L1 environment and this means that this classroom is their L2 world. If it is possible for them to code-switch into L1 there, they will not become accustomed to communicating in L2 when dealing in their area of expertise and it is probable that their learning experience will not replicate their future working environment. This is surely a missed opportunity. It was shown in the second year of the study that ability in L2 increased and it could therefore be expected that greater use of L2 would lead to greater linguistic improvement. The fears that teachers express regarding unnaturalness and concerns surrounding student incomprehension and inhibitions about asking for clarification obviously cannot be ignored and teachers need to act according to the situation they are faced with. However, the educational benefits of persisting in L2, together with the danger of fossilising student behaviour into L2 reception only, could be said to outweigh the advantages of resorting to L1. Convincing students of this could be as important a factor in maintaining the L2 flow, in terms of motivation, as is facilitating interaction through pre or para-course linguistic scaffolding.

Linguistic help It has been pointed out elsewhere in this paper that a major consideration in providing linguistic help needs to be economy of resources. In this section of the study the method trialled was a combination of adjunct course and worksheets together with making the most of existing resources. In the context of our study, one existing 4

For a discussion of this see Doiz / Lasagabaster / Sierra (2012: 218).

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resource is the presence of general English courses at the University language centre and students should certainly be encouraged to join these courses where possible, especially where their level is below B2. It has been an assumption of the study that the cognitive processing which takes place when working in an L2 leads to higher levels of acquisition and greater ease of use.5 For this reason the main aim of an adjunct course should be to encourage L2 participation in subject lessons by providing students with the linguistic functions and vocabulary most commonly used in exchanges regarding their target subject of expertise. The language practitioner can ascertain what these are by observation and collaboration with the subject teacher in a similar way to that described in the body of this article. A brief series of lessons and/or worksheets could then be devised and delivered previous to or early on in the course. This work may not be as intensive as it at first seems. The preparation stage need not be repeated every year although it would be sensible to review the success of the help and revise it accordingly, possibly through reference to the subject teacher and student questionnaires. It is likely that several items will be applicable to a wider range of subjects and could be dealt with in a different way. An example of this is giving ways of intervening and referring to the screen or board when a student wants to comment on or ask a question. Since it is applicable to more subjects this language could be included in the routine faculty language courses which could also be a forum for its practice. It can be seen, then, that with cooperation, organisation and targeting a little help can go a long way. It was seen in the study that many students did not take advantage of the extra linguistic help afforded by the adjunct language sessions, or even the worksheets, and yet they did not show themselves in the observations to be so able as to render linguistic help unnecessary. Course organisers should therefore consider carefully making any such sessions obligatory for all but the most able of students.

References Doiz A / D. Lasagabaster / M. Sierra 2012. Future challenges for Englishmedium instruction at the tertiary level. In A. Doiz / D. Lasagabaster / M. Sierra (eds), English Medium Instruction at Universities: Global Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters: 213-221. EACEA, Eurydice 2012. Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe. Rome: Eurostat UOE. 5

This connection is a main theme of the research that this case study is a part of.

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European Union 2009. The Bologna Process 2020 – The European Higher Education Area in the New Decade. At http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/conference/doc uments/Leuven_Louvain-laNeuve_Communiqu%C3%A9_April_2009.pdf. Georgiou S. 2012. Reviewing the puzzle of CLIL. ELT Journal 66/4: 495504. Kramsch C. 1997. The privilege of the Non-native Speaker. PMLA 112: 359-369. La Repubblica 2013. Corsi in Inglese, il Politecnico rilancia 4 June. At http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2013/06/04/c orsi-in-inglese-il-politecnico-rilancia.html. Occhipinti A. 2009. Foreign language anxiety in in-class speaking activities: two learning contexts in comparison. University of Oslo. At https://www.duo.uio.no/handle/10852/25584. Swales J. 1990 Genre Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ting Y-L.T. 2010. CLIL appeals to how the brain likes its information. International CLIL Research Journal 1/3: 3-18. Vinke A. 1995. English as the Medium of Instruction in Dutch Engineering Education. Delft: Delft University Press.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE GAPS TO CLIL: A CASE STUDY JULIA BOYD UNIVERSITY OF SALENTO, ITALY

Introduction This paper will describe and analyse the design and implementation of a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) course directed at students of European Business Law following an International InterUniversity Masters. Some of the issues faced include managing a heterogeneous group both concerning language and legal knowledge, and negotiating the delicate interface between language lessons and content lessons. It also highlights areas for further research in transversal skills for language teachers. This paper draws from experience gained as part of a team of CLIL teachers. After being nominated as a European Business law CLIL teacher, it was necessary to see just what the implications were; with years of experience in teaching English, gained not only in different countries, but also in numerous different contexts – medical, European projects, public administration, cultural heritage and academic, and as an Economics graduate, one might think that the task in hand was relatively straightforward. After all, most of the previous ESP courses were communication-orientated, learner-centred and cognitively demanding, using authentic materials where possible, in order to facilitate the acquisition of the language skills commonly used by the target group. So where exactly does CLIL differ?

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The origins of CLIL English as a Foreign Language (EFL) practitioners initially considered English in terms of its relationship to another language, namely the first language of the learner. From this rather restricted view of language teaching and learning, we have moved on to English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) which also conveys the idea of using English as a common means of communication and is often used when referring to the communicative method of teaching and learning English which has spread since its beginning in the late 1970s. This communicative method developed out of a desire to prioritize the acquisition of communicative competence as defined by Dell Hymes (1972) over the previous grammartranslation method of second language learning which focused on knowledge rather than skills. Towards the end of the last century, the ever-growing process of globalization and the adoption of English as a Lingua Franca further fostered the need for a command of English for those who were involved in or indeed aspired to be part of this worldwide development. The need for a functional knowledge of the English language so as not to be left out rapidly spread around the world and the demand for language courses rose accordingly. Indeed, many alternative methodologies to the by now wellestablished communicative method were experimented, and one such experiment involved learning non-language subjects in English, i.e. English Medium Instruction (EMI). In CLIL, which grew in popularity during the 1990s, an academic subject is taught through a language which is different from the first language of the learners. Marsh (2005) made the distinction between being taught “in” and “through” a language, specifying that “there is clearly an important issue with regards to simply teaching in English and teaching through English as a methodological approach” (Q8), namely that “through” requires the adoption of appropriate language-sensitive curricula and methodologies. Thus the language is at the same time a vehicle for the learning of content and also an actual learning aim in itself.

CLIL materials The degree of language difficulty in any CLIL activity clearly has to be within the reach of the learner, and according to Krashen’s Input Hypothesis (Krashen 1985) any material used in the learning process should be just above the learner’s present level. The resulting gap is a way

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of motivating the learner and thus cognitive processes are activated which in themselves aid learning. As the aims of CLIL are to increase subject as well as linguistic knowledge, materials have to be used which are both rich in information and which will also fulfil the students’ learning requirements. EFL/ESOL communicative practice aims to encourage students to process language by making them want to use the language they aim to acquire. The methodology of CLIL owes much to these practices which have proved to be both motivating and successful, but in addition CLIL is able to realize a “high level of authenticity of purpose” (Coyle / Hood / Marsh 2010: 5). This purpose, as pointed out by Widdowson (1990: 122), promotes learning: Work in second language acquisition has suggested that it is the creative exploitation of language to achieve purposeful outcomes which generates the learning process itself.

Research into bilingual education has highlighted the fact that an integration of both learning objectives, i.e. the language and the content, leads to improved results in both areas. This is due to the meaningful connections which render the language and subject matters more tangible and therefore useful and consequently easier to remember (Graaff / Koopman / Westhoff: 2006). Indeed current theory says that the using of language helps develop a variety of linguistic skills, and it also helps the learner to retain those skills and knowledge. Indeed, CLIL students have been shown to work more persistently on tasks while putting up with increased frustration and consequently achieving a higher degree of procedural competence in the subject (Vollermer et al. 2006). It was shown that the linguistic problems CLIL students face often lead to a more intense activity of mental construction, which in turn results in an increased semantic processing and an improved understanding of subject-specific content.

CLIL: the so-called 4Cs Considering language education as the starting point, Coyle (1999) developed a conceptual structure for CLIL. This 4Cs framework considers the interrelationship between content, communication, cognition and culture, and draws on integrating learning and language learning by combining learning theories, language learning theories and intercultural understanding. This framework is built on the principle that effective CLIL happens when there is an increased knowledge and understanding of

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the subject, involving cognitive processes and communication, together with enhanced language competence, skills and intercultural awareness. Thus appropriate language use occurs in conjunction with effective language use, and can be applied to any model of CLIL, regardless of subject matter or language level.

Content The first “C” refers to content and concerns subject matter. Content matter does not only deal with the acquisition of knowledge and skills, it is also about learners creating their own knowledge and understanding and consequently developing their own skills. This first principle considers successful content learning and the acquisition of knowledge, skills and understanding inherent to that discipline to be at the very heart of the learning process: the symbiotic relationship between the understanding of language and subject demands a focus on how subjects are taught whilst working with and through another language rather than in another language. Such a shift has brought about a need to redefine methodologies in order to take the language used by both teachers and learners into consideration, which encourages real engagement and interactivity.

Communication The second “C” principle defines language as a vehicle for both communication and learning. Considering language learning from this perspective, it is learnt by means of using it in authentic and unrehearsed yet “scaffolded” situations. This is in contrast with the more structured approaches commonly used in EFL language lessons and allows for less rigid and therefore freer and more authentic communication patterns. This CLIL principle reinforces the notion that for language to have meaning and sense; it needs to be activated in contexts which are motivating for and meaningful to the learners.

Cognition The third principle is that CLIL should cognitively challenge learners whatever their ability. It provides a setting which promotes the development of thinking skills in conjunction with both basic and interpersonal communication skills and cognitive-academic language proficiency.

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Culture Studying a subject through the different language and consequently a different culture eases the process of understanding and tolerating different perspectives. This is one of the fundamental principles necessary to further European understanding and make citizenship a reality. Indeed in this intercultural and multicultural world, this combination of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours allows a speaker, to varying degrees, to recognize, understand, interpret and accept other ways of living and thinking beyond his or her home culture. Unlike EFL/ESOL learners, CLIL learners are intended to acquire what Widdowson (1979: 51) terms a “secondary culture”. In the case in question, culture was an essential part of the CLIL experience, as students were following an International Masters, taking place in Italy and Poland, set in a European context with a multicultural teaching staff. Although CLIL has largely been conceived as a new area for subject teachers, this does not exclude the possibility for EFL teachers to branch out into new subject areas and combine their existing language teaching skills with specific content in order to satisfy the CLIL parameters. Indeed the link between CLIL teaching and multiple intelligence teaching creating a unified teaching and consequently learning experience is probably a lot closer to EFL teachers’ experience than that of most subject teachers. However, in practice the difficulties in implementing CLIL teaching strategies lie precisely in the delicate balancing act in synchronizing language and content-learning objectives. Such an integration of teaching aims means that both language and content are not only present but actually connected to each other. This is not an inconsequential aspect of doing two things at the same time but rather a primary objective of CLIL as, by linking content and language, the processing of information is enhanced and consequently there is an actual increase in learning effectiveness. For over 20 years policy papers from EU bodies and institutions have stated that CLIL is a core instrument for achieving policy aims directed at creating a multilingual population in Europe. Indeed its origins stem from the desire to encourage the learning of other languages in general, as first promoted by the European Commission in 1978 when it proposed that teaching in schools in Member States should be done through the medium of more than one language. The development of CLIL was further accelerated by European project funding from 1984, and in 2005 the European Council recommended that it be adopted throughout the European Union. CLIL methodology draws widely on the experience of

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immersion education in Canada in the late 1960s (Swain and Johnson 1997). Indeed Canada has often been considered as a forerunner to European CLIL. However, Canadian immersion has a fundamental difference from European CLIL, as the language of instruction in Canada is the other official language of the country, thus in the Canadian immersion or rather French immersion programs of the 1950s and 1960s the nationally qualified subject teachers are actually native speakers. Italy is way behind for example the Netherlands where CLIL is a reality in many secondary and tertiary educational institutions (Fledderus / Knoppert / Soesbergen 2011). Although there have been countless initiatives involving CLIL, both on national and individual levels across Europe, this top-down implementation of CLIL does seem to have perhaps made a very large assumption – that there is a ready supply of qualified experts both on subject matters and in English language teaching. Considering the real situation in Italy, where very few subject teachers have sufficient knowledge of the English language to be able to implement CLIL, it is often the EFL or rather ELF teacher who has to bridge this gap. It is undoubtedly a more immediate solution for an English Language teacher to “swot up” on specific terminology or on a specific subject background, considering the years of study needed by a subject teacher to be both confident and competent in using English as a means of instruction. Of course this is not ideal, but one of the attributes of ELF teachers lies precisely in their flexibility to adapt, indeed teaching at C1 level does not just require a knowledge of English syntax, grammar, and lexis, but also background knowledge on the teachers’ part, so that they are able to address matters such as the environment, social issues, policymaking and all the other topics covered in any C1 textbook. Many CLIL projects in southern Italy have seen the subject teacher and English language teacher working side by side. In reality it is very hard to achieve a didactical balance, and often the language teacher just translates what the subject teacher says. This not only goes against CLIL principles, but also doubles the cost for school and educational institutions: after all CLIL offers two for the price of one! Looking at the case in this study, it was necessary to put together a course which aimed at providing the necessary skills to enable students to follow an Inter-University Masters course held in English on European Business Law, with teaching being held in Italy, Poland and Belgium. Thus the focus was on filling the gaps in students’ language and content knowledge, using a type of patchwork approach in the attempt to make a very heterogeneous group more uniform.

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At the beginning of the course a test was administered to evaluate the students’ level of English. The pass mark corresponded to a B1 level according to the Common European Framework of Reference, which was the very minimum considered necessary. Indeed it could be argued that at this level, students would encounter serious difficulties in following any sort of academic tuition, even if they were experts in the subject field in their L1. The descriptor for the listening skills at B1 level is as follows: I can understand the main points of clear standard speech on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc. I can understand the main point of many radio or TV programmes on current affairs or topics of personal or professional interest when the delivery is relatively slow and clear.

The test had two parts – a multiple choice written test, which was principally testing their grammatical knowledge, and an oral test where each student was interviewed individually to ascertain their ability to both comprehend spoken English and to express themselves in everyday English. Both parts were marked out of 30, and the minimum mark was set at 18, which is the norm for Italian university exams which have a pass mark of 18 out of 30. The grades were approximately equivalent to the following levels CEFR C2 C1 B2 B1

Mark 27-30 24-26 21-23 18-20

Table 1 The results were as follows: Student 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Written 30 22 19 18 25 22 29

Oral 26 18 17 20 18 12.5 22

Average 28 20 18 19 21.5 17.25 25.5

CEFR C2 B1 B1 B1 B2 A2 C1

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

18 26 22 18 15 22 20 20

17 20 15 18 15 16 18 24

17.5 23 18.5 18 15 19 19 22

A2 B2 B1 B1 A2 B1 B1 B2

Table 2 Thus 14 of the 15 students passed the written test, but three fell short of 18 when averaging out the written and oral marks. The three students who failed to reach this minimum level attended an extra language course before the start of the master, after which their marks were as follows: Results after extra lessons: Student 6 8 12

Written X X 26

Oral 19 20 X

New Average 20.5 19 20.5

CEFR B1 A2 B1

Table 3 However no test was administered to verify the participants’ legal knowledge in general or any specific knowledge concerning either EU regulations or the terminology used in European documents. Approximately half of the students on this course were law graduates and some of them were already working as professional lawyers, but despite their detailed knowledge of the Italian legal system and an overview of the European legal system, none had any experience of studying in English. Such students needed the linguistic tools to enable them to express and convey their knowledge and facilitate their understanding of a specific field of law, namely European business legislation. On the other hand approximately 50% had no legal background, and were therefore lacking in the basic content knowledge, such as the concepts covered by commercial law or the differences between public international law, private international law and supranational law. Their knowledge of English varied enormously, from C1 to a weak B1 level.

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One of the students had just finished an MA in Economics in London (London School of Economics) and had therefore not only an in-depth awareness of the financial aspects of European policy, but was also used to studying in English. It was interesting to note that although his grammatical skills were exceptional (29 out of 30), he still had difficulty in communicating in English scoring a mere 22 out of 30 in the entrance test. Only one student reached a score nearing a C2 level – she was in fact a language graduate. How should the delicate interface between language lessons and content lessons be addressed in the light of such a heterogeneous group? EFL/ESOL target language needs to include grammatical structure, vocabulary and functions, where ‘functions’ is meant to imply ways of doing things with language. For example, the vocabulary needed for a given function for CLIL is likely to be subject-specific. Functions within CLIL are also likely to be subject-specific. In Business Law, for example, a function could be how to describe rights and duties, and vocabulary might be the terms used in a written contract. The accessibility of the text means that learners can grasp the conveyed content information. This presupposes a platform of alreadyknown concepts from which learners can work to acquire new target concepts. As mentioned already, the correct level of difficulty refers to the theory that it is more motivating and effective for learners to have a level set slightly above their current level. Whereas EFL/ESOL texts should engage and stimulate the interest of the student, with activities in which they can become involved in the processing of language, CLIL texts must engage and stimulate the interest of the student, with activities in which they can become involved in the processing of language and content. Students are not simply the target of our teaching efforts and energies, but they are also a resource, and in this case a very valuable one, as it was possible to exploit the legal expertise of the law graduates in comparing the specific laws in different commercial fields which govern trade and commerce such as agency, banking, bankruptcy, carriage of goods, commercial dispute resolution, company law, competition law, contract, debtor and creditor, sale of goods and services, intellectual property, landlord and tenant, mercantile agency, mortgages, negotiable instruments, secured transactions, real property and tax law. Thus the lawyers were able to assist the non-legal experts, and at the same time specific lexis was being provided and grammatical structures were being practised. In some cases the level of difficulty – just above their existing level to ensure student involvement – was provided by the language element and for

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others by the subject. The patchwork had started, and it was a case of sewing all the pieces together in order to reach a harmonious end product. Thus a lesson might have this format: a) Lead-in discussing the students' awareness of international law and its subdivisions By considering the legal aspects of commercial transactions, students were able to actively engage, regardless of their level of English, in both asking and answering questions, comparing and contrasting national, international and supranational laws. b) Reading on a specific issue Private international law concerns the body of rights and duties of private individuals and business entities coming from different sovereign states. It focuses on two main points: i) the jurisdiction in which a case may be heard ii) which laws from which jurisdiction apply. It differs from public international law as it governs conflicts between private individuals or business entities, and not conflicts between states or other international bodies. c) Gap-fill exercise to re-enforce key terminology and language points 1. What a company can do and has to do is stated by their .…. and …… 2. Public international law is different ……. the private one, because it deals …… conflicts ..…. States and international bodies. d) Round-up discussion of international law and its implications on European trade Communicative and interactive classroom activities were chosen, which “require a learner to act primarily as a language user and give focal attention to message conveyance” (Ellis 2003: 4-5).

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Research findings A closed-ended Likert-type questionnaire was administered to the students in April, after two blocks of lessons in Italy and two blocks in Poland. Specific teaching and CLIL terminology was avoided as the main interest lay in their answers rather than any awareness of CLIL and its implications. In order to ensure that the answers were as true as possible, it was decided to translate the questionnaire into Italian, so that students would be able to answer in an immediate spontaneous way. The questionnaire had a total of 35 Likert items or statements which each student could either agree or disagree with according to the equidistant ranking response scale. The responses ranged from: 1 - completely disagree 2 - disagree 3 - don’t know 4 - agree 5 - completely agree To test the validity of the questionnaire some statements were included with highly predictable if not obvious outcomes, such as I think I'll use English a lot in the future The English language might be useful in my job The responses backed up the predicted results giving the data collected an increased degree of credibility, namely 4.6% and 4.9% with a standard deviation of 0.5 and 0.3 respectively. Although the statements were randomized, in this study they have been grouped together under three different headings, namely GENERAL, which covers general language learning and motivational choices, METHODOLOGY, concerning how language is learnt, and ELF, regarding the role of English as a Lingua Franca.

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Figure 1

To begin with some of the results from the GENERAL section will be analysed. There were six statements referring to their linguistic skills and if the level of these skills had created any problems for them. Before going to Poland, I wish I'd improved my understanding of spoken English – 3.3 ability to speak English – 3.6 writing skills – 3.7 general level of English – 3.7 knowledge of English grammar – 3.4 knowledge of English lexis – 3.9

It is interesting to note that the mean response varied very little for all six statements: this reveals that students did not find their initial level of English a hindrance to following the course on European Business Law in English. This is particularly surprising given the dominance of B1 level students, 66%, who would quite easily be perceived as incurring severe difficulty in following subject-specific lessons in English. Not surprisingly, the area which students would have preferred to have had more expertise concerned lexis – the tool to understanding technical subject-specific terminology – in this case LEGALESE. Statement 8 shows another surprisingly encouraging response in favour of CLIL:

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I would rather have studied all subjects in my mother tongue

The mean for this was 1.52, and the standard divergence was 0.60, indicating that practically all students were not only satisfied with their choice of following a CLIL course, but actually preferred studying their chosen subject “European Business Law” in English – a sign of CLIL’s popularity. Another encouraging piece of data emerges from S.18 – If it hadn’t been necessary, I wouldn’t have learnt a foreign language. Here we can see a mean of 1.63 indicating an extremely high level of disagreement. This is further backed up by S.24 – I only learnt English on this course because I had to. Again the low mean of 1.75 indicates disagreement and further supports the hypothesis that students therefore do not consider the studying of English as an onerous duty, but rather face the challenge with enthusiasm and are aware of both the professional and personal advantages of learning a foreign language. Two other statements aimed at evaluating the students' attitude to CLIL were included. One was a neutral statement S13: .

Legal English is very different from general English

The other (S19) was designed to asses the interest in ESP: Learning English for specific purposes is more interesting than learning general English

In neither case was there a strong expression of agreement or disagreement; and it is interesting to note that there was more disagreement with Learning English for specific purposes is more interesting than learning general English, which comes as a surprise considering the expected motivational impact of studying in English.

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Figure 2

Some of the data concerning methodology will now be analysed. Out of the 11 statements, three had a high level of agreement, namely S6, S27, and S35: 6. It's possible to learn a foreign language by studying other subjects in that language 27. It's easier to learn a language by using it for communication 35. I think it's necessary to back up the study of "European Business Law" with English language lessons

The mean averages for these statements were as follows: 4.06 4.53 4.29 and standard deviation was 0.80 0.70 0.90. Thus students agreed most strongly with statement 6: this is not only the highest mean, but it also has the lowest degree of deviation. They were

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adamant in their belief that it is easier to learn a language when using it for communication. Finally, the statements regarding ELF will be considered.

Figure 3

The most significant data emerges from S32. It is clearly an expression in favour of ELF. Language is not bound up with culture, but is a worldwide means of communication.

Conclusions To sum up, after considering the course design and exactly how the students reacted to their CLIL experience, it can be concluded that it was a learning experience for all those involved, and all in all it was a very productive one. In traditional EFL teaching, content had been a means to an end – namely second language acquisition. CLIL turns these tables round by 180°: language is now only half of the teaching/learning aim, as following the CLIL philosophy content becomes equally important. CLIL poses challenges to ELF teachers, but these gaps can be bridged. Indeed the students of today must be prepared for the challenge of globalization and multilingualism. This challenge also extends to the teachers and policy makers, who have to make sure that those who live in Italy are not at a disadvantage compared to students from northern Europe. A new academic sphere has opened up or rather branched out, needing

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professionals with transversal knowledge who are able to teach the multitasking skills and holistic intelligence which is not only useful, but increasingly necessary in a competitive and ever more demanding labour market.

References Commission of the European Communities 2005. A New Framework Strategy for Multilingualism. At http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/policies/lang/doc/com596_en.pdf. Council of Europe, Eaquals, Alte 2000. Language Passport, European Language Portfolio. Milan: Grafiche Mek. —. 2011. The 4Cs in CLIL. At http://conbat.ecml.at/Glossary/4CsinCLIL/tabid/1503/language/enGB/Default.aspx. Coyle D. 1999. Theory and planning for effective classrooms: supporting students in content and language integrated learning contexts. In J. Masih (ed.), Learning Through a Foreign Language. London: CILT: 46-62. —. 2000a. Meeting the challenge – the 3Cs curriculum. In S. Green (ed.), New Perspectives on Teaching and Learning Modern Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters: 158-183. —. 2000b. Raising the profile and prestige of Modern Foreign Languages in the whole school curriculum. In K. Field (ed.), Issues in Modern Foreign Languages Teaching. London: Routledge Falmer: 245-258. Coyle D / P. Hood / D. Marsh 2010. CLIL Content and Languages Integrated Learning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalton-Puffer C. 2007. Discourse in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) Classrooms. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. De Graff R / G.J. Koopman 2006. Didactische richtlijnen bij tweetalig onderwijs Didactische richtlijnen bij tweetalig onderwijs: onderzoek naar didactische gedragingen van docenten bij tweetalig onderwijs. Utrecht: Utrecht University. Dörnyei Z. 2001. Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis R. 2003. Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fledderus W. / R. Knoppert / F. Soesbergen 2011. Teaching with CLIL: learning and language come together. At

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http://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/208325. Hymes D.H. 1972. Models of the interaction of language and social life. In J.J. Gumperz / D. Hymes (eds), Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 35-71. Johnson R.K. / M. Swain 1997. Immersion Education: International Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly M. / M. Grenfell 2004. European profile for language teacher education. Commission of European Communities. Kramsch C. 1993. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marsh D. 2003. CLIL Milestones supported by the European Commission At http://www.clilcompendium.com/miles.htm. —. 2005. Adding language without taking away. Guardian Weekly April 8. At http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2005/apr/20/guardianweekly. guardianweekly13. Mehisto P. / D. Marsh / M.J. Frigols 2008. Uncovering CLIL. Oxford: Macmillan. Nuffield Language Inquiry 2000. The Final Report: Nuffield Languages Enquiry Languages: the Next Generation. London: Nuffield Foundation. At http://languages.nuffieldfoundation.org/filelibrary/pdf/languages_finalr eport.pdf.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN USING MULTIPLE-CHOICE TESTS TO SEPARATE LANGUAGE COMPETENCE FROM KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING OF COURSE CONTENT IN THE CONTEXT OF CLIL COURSES THOMAS CHRISTIANSEN UNIVERSITY OF SALENTO, ITALY

Introduction Since the 1990s, so-called CLIL approaches have been enthusiastically advocated firstly within Europe and then around the world. Such a trend is widely applauded by experts (e.g. Graddol 2006, Coyle et al. 2010) and backed up by research even if there are inevitable reservations about the quality of some of the courses on offer (see Mehisto 2008; Ioannu Georgiou 2012). An often neglected aspect of CLIL is the area of testing: not only the effectiveness of various test formats but how readily they can be made to fit in with the system in which they are to be introduced. In the Italian university context, there is a long tradition of “mass testing”, due to the large numbers of students who have typically had to take the same exams numerous times in order to pass, and more recently because of the multitudes of candidates in degree course admission tests (in the thousands at some faculties such as medicine or engineering). In both these scenarios, multiple choice tests have proved to be a flexible and costeffective solution, especially so when computer-based. Multiple choice tests, however, have well-known drawbacks (see Phelps 1996) and, in a CLIL context, their usefulness may be seen as limited for testing the problem-solving competences which are often seen as intrinsic to CLIL courses (see Marsh 2000). Most pressingly, however, when used in conjunction with CLIL courses, there is an obvious danger of confusion between assessment of

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content1 and language with the result that it is often impossible to distinguish between performance in one area from that in another. Furthermore, depending on the context (school, university or other), rules may be laid down across the board regarding assessment and what exactly can be tested in each exam: something which may limit the kind of multidisciplinary approach intrinsic to CLIL. Such considerations may have negative effects on the reception of such courses: an important concern in a climate of cost cutting where many see change of all kinds as at best an unwelcome distraction, at worst a threat to their position and their way of doing things, or are otherwise dismissive of what they see as a mere fad. In the next section we look briefly at some of the issues involved in the separation of content and language. In the third and fourth sections we discuss the two case studies that are the subject of our analysis here. In the first of these studies, looking at a more traditional ESP course, we examine student performance in free-access online multiple choice tests and examine how their performance differs according to whether the questions are language-oriented or content-oriented, or a mixture of both. In the second study, working with a different group of subjects on a CLIL course proper, we try to design questions that more reliably separate language competence from knowledge and understanding of course content and remedy some of the limitations identified in the first study. Of particular interest is the question of whether students on the CLIL course proper perform better in all categories of questions (language-oriented, contentoriented or a mix) than those on the ESP course. Furthermore, as part of this second study, we try to develop a specific user-friendly way of designing and assessing multiple choice test items that allows educators to reliably distinguish student performance in each area of performance (language and content). In general, the approach we adopt is largely qualitative, focused on small groups of subjects. The data we work with comes in a variety of forms and has been collected in a number of ways. As such, it reflects the fact that this research was conducted in two specific contexts and was not conducted according to some pre-established plan but rather evolved organically as the study progressed in response to the findings as they 1

Often in the literature a contrast is made between cognition and language (see the 4 Cs below). We speak here about content as this entails more than just the mental processes by which knowledge is acquired relative to the specific academic subject, but also the set of facts and concepts which are acquired through cognition and which are traditionally seen as intrinsic to the subject: for example, in chemistry, the symbols for elements (e.g. Ag for silver).

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were collected within real-life teaching and learning situations (with all the complicating factors that this involved), not within controlled contexts set up specifically for experimental purposes. We do not, however, claim that the findings of our research and the conclusions we draw from them represent definitive answers to the research question posed. Rather, we intend what follows to be an informed contribution, based on practical research, into an open debate.

Separating content and language in CLIL assessment According to Marsh, Marsland and Maljers (1998), CLIL involves the complete integration of content with an L2 which, in effect, entails the total immersion of subject matter in L2. Four concepts, known as the “4Cs”, distinguish CLIL from traditional Content Based Language Learning (CBLL) or bilingual education in general (as carried out in Canada from the 1960s onwards):2 Content; Communication; Cognition; Culture (aka Citizenship / Community). At the basis of CLIL methodology is the idea that content and language learning are integrated, one reinforcing the other; content provides the context for meaningful and authentic language acquisition. In this way, it is argued that learning a subject in an L2 can broaden a student’s perspective both on the subject itself and on society and culture in general. In particular, having learnt a subject in depth in an L2, a student gains access to that subject’s specific discourse community in that specific language. In the case of English, this constitutes an internationalisation of the student’s knowledge and skills. In the words of the European Commission (2003: 8), CLIL “can provide effective opportunities for pupils to use their new language skills now, rather than learn them now for use later.”3 Whatever the precise approach adopted, it is clear from the above considerations that testing in CLIL presents particular challenges because both the language and content components must be assessed as well, ideally as the 4Cs. As Short (1993: 633) notes, this is a difficult task: The many varieties of alternative assessment include performance-based tests, portfolios, journals, projects, and observation checklists. Although these measures allow better demonstration of student knowledge, they can nonetheless confound teachers of language minority students. 2

See Baker (2011). Within the broad CLIL approach, one can also distinguish between different degrees of CLIL: the less-demanding soft (language led), mid- and hard (content led).

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Complications arise first because teachers must determine whether the language or the content is being assessed in these alternative measures. Then teachers must distinguish between the language and content knowledge of the students and decide if one is interfering with the demonstration of the other.

The difficulty stems from the fact that language competence and knowledge of course content are distinct cognitive domains and constitute different skills, not forgetting of course that knowledge of content itself may constitute quite different kinds of cognition according to different academic subjects. There is an obvious need, both for purposes of didactics and assessment within an academic course context, to be able to measure performance in each separately. The problem is that content is manifested through form and form only exists as a manifestation of a particular content. This relationship between the manifested and the medium of manifestation is referred to in the famous line from Yeats: “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”4 Given the difficulties of testing CLIL and of separating content from language, multiple choice tests may seem a rather simplistic tool for CLIL assessment. Indeed, one can list various shortcomings which should make one wary of using them. In Figure 1 we present, side by side for comparison, the often cited advantages and disadvantages of multiple choice tests. As can be seen, many of the disadvantages relate to bad test item design and bad administration and supervision in general (e.g. failure to prevent copying), not actually to the multiple choice format itself. In particular, the possibility for copying can be significantly reduced by use of randomisation and creation of individual tests for each student out of question banks.5

4

W.B. Yeats: “Among School Children”. Another of the recurrent criticisms of multiple choice tests is that they constitute exercises in what students have traditionally called “multiple guess”. Statistically, while for each four option question (e.g. A, B, C or D), a guesser has typically a one in four (25%) chance of being correct, the chance of getting two answers, whether successive or not, is one in 16; guessing three, one in 64; four, one in 256, five, one in 1,024 and so on in multiples of four exponentially. The best strategy for a guesser would be to put the same answer for every question (e.g. A). Statistically, if the answers have been randomised correctly, this should guarantee approximately 25% correct answers – still well below the usual pass band for a test.

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Disadvantages x They are usually typified as constituting summative, as opposed to formative testing. x They do not directly reflect types of activities (e.g. tasks, projects, group work) that may be an integral part of CLIL learning (e.g. 4 Cs). x While testing recognition of correct / incorrect answers, they do not require students to produce appropriate answers for themselves. x They do not give students an opportunity to show what they want to say but rather test only if they know specific points highlighted in questions. x They may oversimplify complex issues, forcing students to choose between reductive, “right” and “wrong” interpretations. Typically test LOTS (low order thinking skills) (Bloom 1968). x Students may be able to copy. x Students may be able to “guess” the right alternative.

Advantages

x They constitute a familiar format; students are rarely confused about what is required and how performance is tested. x They are easy to produce, administer and mark even with large numbers and in numerous sittings. They are ideal for online resources. x They have a simple basic format that can be adapted and tweaked to assess a variety of question types. x Assessment is objective (provided that questions are fair and balanced). x They may be used for selfassessment.

Figure 1. Advantages and disadvantages of multiple choice tests in regard to CLIL courses

Furthermore, as the advantages listed make clear – though not suited for every kind of assessment, especially high order thinking skills, such as project work – multiple choice tests are certainly useful resources for a CLIL teacher, especially in a university context where they may be suitable for admission tests for courses taught in English, which have been introduced both to attract more international students and to “internationalise” local students. In particular, they can also be used to weed out weaker students before more elaborate tests, such as project work, or interviews, which are more time-consuming and thus less practical if large numbers of students are involved. In conclusion, multiple choice tests, while limited in many respects, are a tried and tested format which, for low order thinking skills, has proved more practical than more sophisticated alternatives.

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Case Study 1 In our first case study we look, for reasons of contrast with the second case study, at a conventional English for Specific Purposes course. This was entitled English for ICT and was taught as a separate module (62 hours) on a degree course in Information and Communication Technology.6 ICT constituted the context for the language taught on the course; an increased knowledge or understanding of ICT per se was not, however, one of the course objectives. An analysis was made of the performance of eleven volunteer students in a self-access multiple choice test delivered through a Moodle (Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) platform.7 In all, these eleven students made 182 attempts altogether (ranging from 2 to 39, standard deviation = 11.84). The test was made up of 50% questions relating to ICT (187 items in question bank) and 50% general English questions (1,241 items in question bank). The ICT test items (questions) were drawn up before the analysis was conceived but it was still possible to identify within them both elements of content and language assessment as discussed in the previous section. This can be illustrated by examples 1-3 below (correct answers identified by a tick). 1) A _____ is both an input and output device. A. touchscreen B. keyboard C. printer D. scannerD 2) There are _____ the rights of a data subject and the responsibilities of a data controller. A. rules governing D B. governing rules C. regulations forbidding D. forbidding rules

6

The students were enrolled on the 2nd year of the Laurea Trienniale (bachelor’s level degree) in Informatica (ICT), at the Brindisi branch of the Università degli Studi di Bari ‘Aldo Moro’, Italy. 7 https://moodle.org/.

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3) Hardware includes memory chips and other devices ____ a hard disk. A. likes B. same as C. such as D D. as Bearing in mind the philosophical difficulties of separating form from content in language, it can be shown that if the lexical items in 1-3 above are substituted by meaningless tokens, thereby reproducing the effect of a lack of content knowledge as opposed to a low level of linguistic competence on the part of a testee, then one can still identify which of the options are at least linguistically feasible (marked with a tick below): 1) A(n) ____ is both an input and output device. A. WWW D B. XXX D C. YYY D D. ZZZ D 2) There are _____ the XXX and the YYY of a ZZZ. A. rules governing D B. governing rules C. regulations forbidding D D. forbidding rules 3) WWW includes XXXs and other YYYs ____ a ZZZ. A. likes B. same as C. such as D D. as As can be seen, to someone who knows absolutely nothing about ICT or computing, there are no linguistic clues to which option is the correct answer to question 1, whereas for question 2, even without specialised knowledge, it is obvious that only A or B are linguistically possible. By contrast for question 3, no expert knowledge is required at all as only C is linguistically possible, regardless of the content. These three sentences typify the three degrees of content-language mixing commonly found in multiple choice questions; the first is a case of what we shall call a content-oriented question (CO), question 2 of a

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content-language-mixed question (CLM) and 3 of a language-oriented question (LO).8 Together in this last category we put all the general English questions taken from a database of questions linked to general, not specifically ICT, contexts. Overall, it transpired that testees found CO questions easiest, getting them correct 84.4% of the time, followed by LO (71.4%) and lastly CLM (66.7%). Whereas it was perhaps predictable that ICT students would find content questions (like 1) easiest on the grounds that expert knowledge would prove largely sufficient to identify the correct option, it may come as a surprise that it is CLM (like 2 above) that proved most difficult, and not LO (like question 3). One might have assumed that because such questions assessed at least some element of content knowledge, they would have been marginally easier than purely LO questions. That students find them more difficult may be taken as a reflection of the fact that linguistic competence and knowledge of content constitute two very different cognitive processes, hence the increased difficulty when a question combines and assesses elements of both. Using data from a questionnaire given to testees, it is possible to see whether scores on LO, CLM or CO questions relate both to the testees’ level of linguistic competence in English as gauged by the number of years that they have studied English at school and at university9 and to the testees’ knowledge of the specific subject of ICT as indicated by their declared marks in other non-linguistic exams on their degree course. Table 1 below is divided for ease of reference into three sections. In each of these, we rank the testees according to their score in the column on the right (LO, CLM or CO). We give the average of the years of studying English (YSE) and average mark in other exams on course (AME) for the top five students and compare these with the respective means for the bottom six testees. Here and in other tables below we give figures to two decimal places.

8

In a handful of cases we found questions where three of the options were linked to content and only one to language. These we classed as CO rather than CLM. Similarly the very few questions where only one option was CO were classed as LO. 9 Only two of the testees had recognised English language certificates attesting their levels.

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LO S5 S1 S4 S11 S7

100 85.98 78.08 76.31 74.8

MEAN TOP 5 S3 S10 S6 S9 S2 S8

71 70.53 66.36 61.79 50.68 49.83

MEAN BOTTOM 6 Difference Difference as % of higher figure

YS E 13 14 11 14 14 13. 2 6 6 11 14 6 6 8.1 7 5.0 3 38. 13

AME / 30 26 26.5 28 26 28.63

CLM S5 S1 S11 S7 S3

27.03

100 83.77 72.77 67.65 65.03

MEAN TOP 5

27 25 24 23 29 26.1

S4 S10 S2 S6 S9 S8

62.66 61.79 57.55 56.14 53.2 52.88

YS E 13 14 14 14 6 12. 2 11 6 6 11 14 6

AME /30 26 26.5 26 28.63 27 26.83 28 25 29 24 23 26.1

25.68

MEAN BOTTOM 6

9

25.85

1.34

Difference

3.2

0.98

4.97

Difference as % of higher figure

26. 23

3.64

CO S5 100 S1 92.5 S11 90.68 S7 87.82 S3 83.9 MEAN TOP 5 S4 83.33 S10 81.24 S2 80.88 S6 76.92 S9 76.19 S8 74.76 MEAN BOTTOM 6 Difference Difference as % of higher figure

YSE 13 14 6 14 14 12.2 6 11 14 6 6 11

AME / 30 26 26.5 25 26 28.63 26.43 27 24 23 26.1 29 28

9

26.18

3.2

0.24

26.23

0.92

Table 1. Comparison of performance on LO, CLM and CO questions with years of studying English (YSE) and average mark in other exams on course (AME).

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Comparing the two means (that for the top five testees and that for the bottom six) shows clearly that for each category of question there is a noticeable difference in YSE (for LO a difference of 5.03, for both CLM and CO 3.21 which, to show their size relative to the figures from which they are calculated, constitute respectively differences equal to 38.13% and 26.23% of the higher, top five, figure). By contrast, there are only very small differences for average marks in other exams on course (LO = 1.35; CLM =0.98; CO = 0.25 corresponding to 4.97%, 3.64% and 0.92%). This is interesting as it indicates that linguistic competence is a far more important factor with all sorts of questions, even CO, than content knowledge. Indeed, the category where there is least difference between the means for the top five and bottom six testees as regards AME is CO. This seems counter-intuitive and there may be various explanations as to why YSE seems to be a better predictor of performance on CO questions than does AME,10 but the findings of Table 1 raise the distinct possibility that such tests as these assess linguistic competence much more than content knowledge. This is a finding that merits scrutiny and it is revealing to look at how a student’s performance in these self-access online tests varies over time and to measure the comparative rates at which LO, CO and CLM scores improve, or decline, and thus to identify underlying trends and to ascertain whether these give a different picture from that obtained from the figures for global performance. To examine performance over time, we measure scores in CO, LO and CLM questions in individual tests by each of the eleven testees and plot their totals on a graph. As each test was generated separately by the computer (50% general, 50% ICT as outlined above), the actual proportion of CO, LO and CLM questions differed: it should be remembered that these were actual tests designed for practice and only analysed retrospectively for this study. For this reason, we calculated the number of correct answers as a percentage of the questions of that category in each test (not as a percentage of the whole test). Using Microsoft’s Excel package, we were able to plot graphs from the various scores showing performance over time and, for each category, generate a trendline or “line of best fit” which highlighted in a linear fashion the general trend of the raw data (see Figure 2 below). 10

Of course, raw quantity of years studying English is not a direct measure of a given student’s linguistic level, as it takes into account neither the quality of the teaching nor the students’ aptitude for language acquisition. Furthermore, many years studying in English may be an indirect indicator of the general quality of the school; perhaps, for example, schools more suited all round to ICT happen to devote a larger part of the curriculum to English.

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Figure 2. Example graph showing student performance over time

Figure 2 shows the performance (y or vertical axis) of student 3 on LO, CLM and CO questions over 10 tests (x or horizontal axis). For each line, we have generated linear trendlines, each of which “uses this equation [as shown in legend found to the right of the graph] to calculate the least squares fit for a line where m is the slope and b is the intercept to calculate the least squares fit for a line: where m is the slope and b is the intercept”.11 On our graph, going from the uppermost, the trendline for CO (dotted line), has a slope of value 1.421, that for LO 2.4906 and that for CLM a negative value of -0.3644, indicating that performance actually gets worse over time. As can be seen by looking at the trendlines, that for LO is steeper than CO and represents a more rapid rate of improvement in score. The precise figures for the slope of trendlines can be used to quantify and objectively compare the gradients of increase or decrease in the trendlines relating to performance and thus can serve as a useful ready means of comparison as set out in Table 2:

11

office.microsoft.com.

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No. of tests

Slope (+ = upwards; - = downwards) LO

CLM

CO

-1.99

-0.57

-1.85

0.5

1.09

0.44

2.49

-0.36

1.42

2.21 0

0.6 0

4.05 0

1.82

2.12

-0.45

23

0.23

0.96

0.59

35

0.43

0.69

0.82

S1

15

S2

39

S3

10

S4 S5 S6

5 2 11

S7 S8

317

S9

10

2.4

-0.99

1.34

S10

11

1.09

1.77

0.14

S11

21

1.24

-0.6

1.23

Total 182 ST.DEV.

10.43 1.32

4.7 1.32

7.72 1.02

Table 2. Comparison of trendline slopes of different speakers’ performances over time The majority of slopes on Table 2 (23 out of 33) are positive and thus there is a general trend of improvement in all categories of questions. The data for S5 stand out. Indeed this testee did two tests, in both of which s/he attained 100%, which accounts for the fact that the slope in all three categories is 0: the trendline being absolutely level, his/her performance shows neither improvement nor regression. As can be seen by looking at the totals (bottom but one row), the category for which the trendline was steepest (indicating a more marked rate of improvement) was LO followed by CO and lastly CLM, which contrasts with the findings for the total score for all tests where CO was highest and LO came second. CLM comes last in both counts, confirming that testees find questions that mix language with content most challenging. The figures for standard deviation (bottom row “ST.DEV.”) are revealing: a low score indicating a greater degree of uniformity among the various scores and thus a clearer and more universal trend. The lowest standard deviation is found with CLM, which shows that the tendency to find CLM more difficult is the most uniform among testees. The faster rate of improvement with LO questions over time is also interesting when one considers that the database for LO questions was

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much larger (1,241 questions) than that for CO and CLM (187 questions together). Conceivably, performance in CO and CLM questions should improve in any case because the likelihood of encountering the same questions again and again would be relatively high. Such a prospect would be much less likely for LO questions. Rather, the improvement here may be put down to the tests either directly or indirectly having a formative function and improving the testees’ general linguistic ability in some way.12 In Table 3, we compare trends in improvement in LO, CLM and CO questions with the number of tests taken by each student, and in this way we ascertain with which aspect of performance the correlation with number of tests taken is strongest, using the same method as used for Table 1. No of tests taken 39 S2 35 S8 23 S7 21 S11 15 S1 MEAN TOP 5 11 S6 11 S10 10 S3 10 S9 5 S4 2 S5 MEAN BOTTOM 6 Difference Difference as % of higher figure

LO Trendline 0.5 0.43 0.23 1.24 -1.99 0.08 1.82 1.09 2.49 2.40 2.21 0 1.67 1.58

CLM Trendline 1.09 0.69 0.96 -0.6 -0.57 0.08 1.77 2.12 -0.99 -0.36 0.6 0 0.52 0.21

CO Trendline 0.44 0.82 0.59 1.23 -1.85 0.31 0.14 -0.45 1.34 1.42 4.05 0 1.08 0.84

94.99

39.94

77.34

Table 3. Comparison of performance on LO, CLM and CO questions with number of tests taken Table 3 provides some very interesting data. Indeed, it transpires that the biggest difference in proportion to the figures involved is for LO, 12

By directly, we mean that it is the actual doing of the tests that improves performance; by indirectly, that the tests may, for example, motivate students to study more.

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where there is a 94.99% difference in favour of the bottom six students, indicating very strongly that the improvement in marks for testees who took the tests more times was less pronounced than for those who took fewer tests. At first glance, this would seem to suggest that taking the tests more times had a detrimental effect on linguistic performance. Such an analysis may be to confuse cause with effect. An equally plausible explanation would be that those who were getting better scores did not feel the need to take as many tests. The data for student 5 support this. This testee took the test only twice, getting 100% both times. It is in fact on CLM that the apparently detrimental effect of taking the test repeatedly is least pronounced (at only 39.94%: almost half that of CO). This shows that it is performance in these questions that is relatively most improved by repeated test taking. We can conclude this first case study by summarising that of the three parameters examined, linguistic competence turns out to be most important not just for LO but also for both CLM and CO. In this context, questions that mix content and language skills prove more difficult for learners than those which focus purely on language or content. Coordinating linguistic competence with knowledge of content seems particularly challenging for learners. This suggests that in these kinds of tests (and the accompanying ESP course as a whole), while there is evident improvement in linguistic performance, the ability to apply the underlying competence to content-oriented contexts is less developed to start with and develops at a markedly slower rate than does linguistic competence. The mismatch between acquisition of linguistic competence and content knowledge is a rarely researched aspect of English medium learning and a crucial issue in CLIL. In the next section we will report a much more focused survey of a CLIL course proper.

Case Study 2 For case study 2, we looked at a course which had been designed following a CLIL framework, where content was an integral part of the course, not just a context in which to introduce language as determined by a linguistic curriculum. Specifically, the course was the English component of a Master’s level degree in Political Science at the Università del Salento, Italy.13 The content of the course were extracts of Thomas 13

Our thanks go to Rita Bennett, the course lecturer, for her very active cooperation in this second case study.

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More’s Utopia, ironically in English translation from the original Latin (Paul Turner 1972). Officially, the focus of the course was mainly on the language, but a CLIL methodology was used as part of an ongoing experiment with a view to introducing CLIL courses proper in the faculty. The course was 45 hours long. Students were set three separate paper tests at regular intervals during the course (after 12-15 hours). These tests were designed specifically and contained 15 questions: five each of LO, CLM and CO. In all, 40 students took part in this study, 37 of whom did all three tests. As with case study 1, the testees did best in CO questions (average 83.78% correct) then LO (75.68%) and lastly CLM (56.76%), confirming once more that students seem to find it easier to deal with language and content separately than when they are mixed. In contrast to case study 1, language content of the tests was tightly controlled, as were the three different question types, which were specifically designed to separate clearly aspects of content and language as shown by examples 4-6, respectively LO, CLM and CO: 6) If you know the time of departure and arrival and the distance travelled, you can work _____ the speed. A. up B. out D C. over D. back 7) Which ONE of the below is both CORRECT linguistically and TRUE? A. No beer is drunk on Utopia. D B. There is no honey or wine on Utopia. C. At harvest time there is often not enough labour because people don’t must to leave the towns to help on the farms. D. People in Utopia can to use the horses for riding practice. 8) Utopia was published in _____. A. 1531 B. 1478 C. 1516 D D. 1535 When drafting questions like 7 (CLM) we experimented with various formats and opted for one where the elements of content and language,

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though intermingled, were easily separable. To do this, we first identified two basic parameters for distinguishing language and content. These were both linked to the idea of correctness, but connected on the one hand to language, i.e. accuracy, and on the other to factuality, i.e. truth: see Figure 3. CORRECTNESS LINGUISTIC

FACTUAL

DACCURATE

DTRUE

× INACCURATE

× FALSE

Figure 3. Parameters of correctness for CLM questions

In this way, a CLM question using the same formula as 7 above can be constructed as below (9), using a general question (symbols in bold as per Figure 3): 9) Which ONE of the below is both CORRECT linguistically and TRUE? A. The Edinburgh is in the Scotland. ×DIT B. Edinburgh is the largest city in Scotland. D× AF C. The Edinburgh is in the Northern Ireland. ×× IF D. Edinburgh is further north than Newcastle upon Tyne. DD AT Using such questions, it is possible to see where the testee is able to identify the linguistically accurate structures (B and D) and where they are able to see the factually true ones (A and D), as well as when they are able to spot neither (C) or, as is ideal, both (D). This technique may be also used for assessment, especially with the kind of format that we adopt (see question 7 above). For example, in the original test, a student who selected at random was awarded 1 mark for section 3 of the test (CLM). However, breaking down their replies according to the parameters of A and T as outlined in Figure 3, we can see that they identified two of the A options (LO) and five of the (CO) options (Table 4):

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Q11

Q12

Q13

Q14

Q15

Original Mark (AT)

LO Mark (A)

CO Mark (T)

× AF

× IT

× IT

× IT

D AT

1

2

5

Table 4. Alternative marking scheme for CLM questions As alternative marks, we may choose to adopt either 2 for language or 5 for content, although in the context of the whole test it may be necessary to weigh these marks so that this section does not carry more marks than the other two: LO and CO. Whatever the precise marking scheme adopted, we are able with this simple method to quantify and report the differing performance in linguistic and content elements of the test.14 Such a scheme allowed us to record not only testees’ marks but also the precise options which they choose for CLM and count the proportion of A (accurate) and T (true) options which they picked (Figure 4):

Figure 4. Comparison of responses correctly identifying True (content) and Accurate (language) options in CLM questions over three tests

14

Unfortunately such a marking scheme could not be easily accommodated by existing software such as Moodle (even though there is the option to allocate different marks to different answers as a unit but not directly to individual elements of these, as we propose here).

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As Figure 4 shows, although over the three tests the testees are better at identifying the content components of CLM questions (i.e. choosing the options like A or D in question 9 above), there is a sharp rise in their ability to choose linguistically accurate options (like B or D). Indeed, by Test 3, the score for A (linguistic) has overtaken T (content). These test results, like those in case study 1, indicate that the accompanying courses seem to foster linguistic competence faster than they do content knowledge. As in case study 1, we can attempt to gauge how different factors affect testees’ performance on CLM questions, looking first at the level of linguistic competence, as this seemed most significant in the earlier study. As a preliminary to this survey, students on the course were given a placement test to assess their linguistic level. From this it transpired that two out of 40 were at B2 level of the Common European Framework, eight were B1, 14 were A2 and two were A1. The remaining 14 students did not sit the pre-course test. In Figure 5, we show the trends in average marks in LO, CLM and CO of testees grouped according to CEF level over the three tests:

Figure 5. Trends in average marks in LO, CLM and CO according to CEF level

It can be seen that there is a clear correlation between CEF level and performance in LO over the three tests. Marks progress in a steady linear fashion almost indistinguishably from the trendline. For CLM and CO, the

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correlation between CEF level and performance is characterised by a similar trend but only from levels A2 to B2. In both cases, however, the performance at A1 level is anomalous, particularly so with CO where the A1 score is actually higher than the B2 score. There are only two students in this category so individual performances have greater impact on the average, and the lecturer expressed surprise that one in particular of the students in question had obtained such a low score as they did on the placement test. As in case study 1, in order to assess the effect that content knowledge has on the different types of question, we asked testees to give details of their average marks in other, non-linguistic exams on their degree course. Below on Figure 6 we give the results of these, grouping students together according to their marks (out of a maximum of 30) and taking the mean for each group of students who reported the same average marks.

Figure 6. Trends in average marks in LO, CLM and CO according to average mark in other exams on the course

From Figure 6, the closest correlation between marks in other exams on course and scores in tests is with CO, then with CLM and lastly, marginally LO, whose trendline is almost flat. By comparing the slopes of the trendlines with those on Figure 5, it can be seen that AME seems to correlate more to CO than does CEF level (0.0911 vs. 0.023), as does CLM (0.0248 vs. 0.0171). For LO, however, the correlation is stronger with CEF level (0.666 vs. 0.0118).

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However, this analysis, although objective, is based on data for CEF levels which, as we mentioned above, is influenced strongly by the scores for the A1 testees which are markedly not aligned to those of the other three: A2, B1 and B2. If we ignore the data for A1 on Figure 5, on the grounds of its anomalous nature, we obtain trendlines for CEF that do correlate markedly more closely with scores in all three categories LO (0.765 vs. 0.911 on Figure 6), CLM (0.325 vs. 0.0248) and CO (0.355 vs. 0.0118):

Figure 7. Trends in average marks in LO, CLM and CO according to CEF level, excluding data from A1 students

To conclude case study 2, we can note that the data show a marked improvement in students’ performance in all sections of the test. This improvement is more marked in identification of T (CO) than A (LO), although it is marked here too. As with case study 1, test scores generally are related more closely to linguistic ability, measured as students’ CEF level. The average mark in other non-linguistic exams on the degree course turns out to be the less important factor of the two for all types of questions (using the trendlines from Figure 7 and not those from Figure 5). This may be because course content in this case (sections of Thomas More’s Utopia) is so specific. Indeed, the questions in the tests assessed LOTs related specifically to the text studied, not to the general subject area (political science). This fact does raise a general point about the types of

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content selected for this CLIL-style course and how far it is marginal to the rest of the students’ studies and the consequences of such a policy.

General conclusions In this study, we have shown how it is possible to distinguish between linguistic performance and knowledge of content in simple L2 multiple choice tests. However, the picture that emerges in these small-scale preliminary studies is complex and open to various interpretations, indicative of the fact that CLIL, by its dual focus, presents many challenges not only to teachers but also to testers. This underlines the fact that CLIL cannot be treated as just another TEFL methodology of concern only to applied linguists; its implications go much further. In particular, the fact that the linguistic level seems to be such an important factor in all parts of the tests analysed (CO as well as LO), coupled with the evidence that testees find CLM questions, where there is assessment of both language competence and knowledge of course content, markedly more difficult than those where they are clearly separated (CO or LO), raises serious questions about how learning a subject in an L2 affects acquisition of knowledge of the subject content, notably that of whether the benefits are mainly in the direction of language acquisition, as is suggested in this study. This study has shown that studying ICT or political science in English undoubtedly makes students better at English, but the question remains about how, other than introducing them to the international discourse community, it makes them better at ICT or political science. The findings indicate that students’ performance in multiple choice tests such as these is affected mostly by their linguistic level. This suggests that on CLIL courses, or other content-based language learning courses of one sort or another, there is a risk that students of a lower linguistic level or who show less of an aptitude for learning languages will acquire content knowledge at a markedly slower rate than if they were studying the same subject in their L1. Research needs to be extended to see if this “linguistic competence effect” is extended to other kinds of assessment, for instance, the project work or task-based activities more often associated with CLIL courses.

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References Baker C. 2011 Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 5th ed. North York, Ontario: Multilingual Matters. Bloom B.S. 1968. Learning for Mastery. The Evaluation Comment. Los Angeles: University of California. Clarke S. 2001. Unlocking Formative Assessment: Practical Strategies for Enhancing Pupils’ Learning in the Primary Classroom. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Commission of the European Communities 2003 Promoting Language Learning and Linguistic Diversity: An Action Plan 2004–2006. Brussels, 24.07.2003 COM2003 449 final. Coyle D, / P. Hood / D. Marsh 2010 CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graddol D. 2006. English Next. British Council. Ioannu Georgiou S. 2012. Reviewing the puzzle of CLIL. ELT Journal 66/4 Special Issue: 495-504. Marsh D. 2000 Using Languages to Learn and Learning to Use Languages: An Introduction to Content and Language Integrated Learning for Parents and Young People. Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä Continuing Education Centre. Marsh D. / B. Marsland / A. Maljers (eds) 1998. Future Scenarios in Content and Language Integrated Learning. Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä. Mehisto P. 2008. CLIL counterweights: recognising and decreasing disjuncture in CLIL. International CLIL Research Journal I/I: 93-119. Phelps R. 1996. Are US students the most heavily tested on Earth? Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice 15/3: 19–27. Short D.J. 1993. Assessing Integrated Language and Content Instruction. TESOL Quarterly XXVII/4: 627-656.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS AND DEVELOPMENT COURSE AND CLIL LOIS CLEGG UNIVERSITY OF PARMA, ITALY

Introduction This paper describes language work done on the second level degree course in International Business and Development (IBD) delivered in English at the Economics Department of the University of Parma. Intervention by language teaching staff in a two-year project 20102012 has so far involved diagnostic testing of students’ language ability, short seminars on academic writing skills as well as language assistance for non-L1 teaching staff. The aim was for exposure to academic lectures and production of written papers in English to effectively enhance the language learning component of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) rather than simply provide practice. The project also aimed to provide training for final year specialist language students in useful teaching skills. Given that many students are economics students aiming to improve their language skills, there is a need for the IBD course to focus more clearly on language learning as a skill complementary to learning in other subjects. This paper makes several proposals on how this could be done in a context of limited resources. Ideas include closer analysis of the needs of students and subject teachers as well as increased collaboration between subject and language teachers, Academic English tutorials offered at strategic phases of the degree course focusing on necessary skills and, possibly, training for external examinations (e.g. the writing component of IELTS).

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Description of the project The project in question is firstly described, then evaluated in terms of its significance for language learning for IBD students. It is then evaluated in general and in terms of its potential. Lastly, some proposals for the future are put forward. The International Business and Development course started in October 2010. Degree subjects were “economics” subjects, including Economic statistics, International financial institutions and markets, International market and organization law, Cooperation and competition among firms, International accounting and governance, International branding and retailing, Growth and history of global economy, Economic growth, History of globalization, EU policies and projects, International industrial economics, Development economics and international cooperation, and Environmental economics. Students enrolled in each year numbered about eighty and reached 126 in winter 2013. Students are graduates in various fields, including economics but not only economics. A proportion of about ten or fifteen per cent were not L1 Italian speakers. Our project was small-scale and lasted for two academic years. It involved two language professors, one an English language professor, and one an Italian language professor and CLIL specialist, both from the Humanities Faculty, one CEL,1 and several trainees (tirocinanti) who numbered from one to three taking part at the same time. They were students from the five-year degree course (laurea magistrale) in languages, interested in working as English teachers. But perhaps because the laurea magistrale in lingue is now offered only in conjunction with another university, since 2013 it has proved difficult to find undergraduates interested in taking part. The main aim of the project was for exposure to academic lectures, production of written papers and other activities in English to effectively enhance the language learning component of Content and Language Integrated Learning for IBD students. The project also aimed to provide support, if it was requested or required, by subject teachers, and training for final year specialist language students in useful teaching skills. This was in order to provide teaching practice or experience and ensure a supply of practitioners for the future. We carried out diagnostic testing of students' language ability at the beginning of the first year, which would ideally have led to language 1

CEL: Collaboratore ed Esperto Linguistico, native-speaker language teacher.

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tuition with explicit focus on language learning for weaker students. But although we were able to test them for progress at the beginning of the second semester, it was impossible to obtain useful results from this because of lack of personnel. The CEL gave a “crash” seminar on academic writing skills to students near the end of the second year in order to support dissertation writing. The seminar was based on online academic writing materials, mainly from the University of Southampton and the University of New South Wales, already indicated by subject staff and websites suggested by a tirocinante who herself had followed a course in writing skills in the UK. Several IBD students requested native speaker CEL assistance when writing their dissertation, particularly for very last minute checking and revision. These students appeared to be those who had benefited least from the seminar. Revision of power point slides and written materials such as questions for written exams was offered for subject teachers. This was intended to be carried out by tirocinanti but L1 speaker supervision was perceived to be necessary by academic staff and tirocinanti themselves. Tirocinanti produced language learning materials and exercises for student self-study based on lesson content provided by about four subject staff. A short language test was carried out as part of student selection for exchange programmes. The project, however, had several important weaknesses; chiefly that project members were not present during subject lessons or course activities. There was no involvement in examinations and no creditbearing formalised assessment of language levels.

Evaluation of the project The project promised to boost the profile of the IBD course and enrich it for students and teachers. The advantages of CLIL can be summed up in the words of Llinares et al. (2012: 34): “cognitive engagement with meaningful content is a driver of both linguistic and conceptual development.” But for IBD students there was confusion about this. The language learning aims were unstated and unclear. There was no formal entry barrier or required language level for entry. Intake to date has been mainly graduates of first level degree courses where the only language requirement is a pass-fail test at B1 level on receptive skills. In fact, the areas of language use that have dominated communicatively-oriented educational practice and, in many degree courses, university language tests, have not traditionally been EAP or anything similar. But as Byrnes

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(2008) writes, quoted in Llinares et al. (2012: 9): “educational knowledge is shaped through language that fundamentally differs from language used to transact life’s tasks in, for example, social encounters or to seek or provide information – areas of language use that have dominated communicatively oriented educational practice.” As they wrote in the selection test, many students hoped to learn “an excellent English”, but all parties were vague as to how this would happen. An important concept at university level is CALP (Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency). This is in contrast with BICS (Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills) as defined by Cummins (1981) cited in Coyle et al. (2010: 133). CALP is the cognitive or communications ability to interact in the “class”. It includes skills such as comparing, classifying, synthesizing, evaluating, and inferring. IBD students were not tested on their abilities in these areas and, as far as could be ascertained, received no specific training. Mezzadri (2009: 205) notes that CEFR B2 level would in any case be insufficient for CLIL at university level and says it would probably be advisable to draw up specific levels of competence for CLIL based on CEFR descriptors. The construct of Academic Discourse Competence proposed by Wolfgang Zydatiß (2012: 23) would be useful, but it would clearly be an ambitious project. Given the level of complexity of academic university life, which in Parma involves traditional oral exams and presentations as well as writing short answers and answering essay questions, such descriptors would of course need to be extremely specific and detailed. Given the various motivations for introducing English-delivered courses, including the Anglicisation of scientific disciplines and instrumental use of English, content-based knowledge and skills are intrinsically linked to the linguistic competences needed for learning. Academic language tasks are context-reduced and therefore more challenging. Especially for those IBD students who have no economics background, and have low subject literacy, new language becomes more cognitively demanding. New ideas, concepts and language are being presented to the students at the same time. One of the advantages of CLIL in schools has been found to be that teacher talk contains less distraction and a clearer focus when the teacher speaks in L2, so that although the code itself is more difficult there is less danger of learners “getting lost.” But at university level intuitively this would not seem to be the case. The idea of simplifying language, perhaps by using Latin-based lexis, may also not be useful in the context of students from non-Italian language backgrounds.

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A certain level of CALP is clearly necessary for IBD students. After all, if cognitive demands are not high for a second level degree, where are they high? The wide body of research into CLIL shows that it involves three types of language of learning, for learning and through learning (Doyle et al. 2010: 36). As I noted, project members were not present during IBD lessons. But these types of language would occur in traditional TeacherClass lectures as well as group work and preparation of presentations. This classification is applicable to IBD lessons. LANGUAGE OF – subject-specific terminology. LANGUAGE FOR – participating in tasks typical of the subject. This is language used to carry out the tasks of comparing, classifying, synthesising, evaluating, inferring, drawing conclusions etc. This is the language which enables students to learn. LANGUAGE THROUGH – which activates thinking processes necessary to apply the knowledge of the subject. This language through learning is to do with capturing language as it is needed by learners during learning. New meanings are likely to require new language. I believe that many students will be learning both new language and new concepts when they follow the course on statistics. For example, I myself learnt these terms for types of statistics data set: Cross-sectional: Observations on individuals, households, enterprises, countries, etc. at one moment in time Time series: Observations on income, consumption, interest rates, etc over a number of time periods (years, quarters, months, …) Panel data: Observations on the same cross-section of individuals, households, etc. over a number of time periods However, this framework of three types of language is not currently recognised or used by subject teachers on IBD. Project members are, as noted above, unable to observe methodology used by subject teachers or indeed offer assistance. But the content teacher also plays a role in Language Learning and Teaching. It has, of course, been remarked that all teachers are teachers of language (Bullock 1975, quoted in Ball and Lindsay 2013: 59). In general, a teacher can be seen in many different roles, as a guide, as a learning facilitator, a diagnostician, a planner or as a

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model. The same teacher, of course, acts in some or all of these roles at various times. It is clearly ambitious to ask subject teachers to act as models for spoken English production. But the view of English as an International Language, and not the preserve of native speakers, makes standard native pronunciation perhaps a less urgent concern. The idea of comfortable intelligibility, introduced by Abercrombie in 1949, is useful, and is appropriate in the context of university education. However, Wilkinson (2013: 18) notes one of the factors most affecting student attitude is the level of teachers’ English – “relatively minor pronunciation problems […] can elicit strong negative reactions from students” – and several IBD subject teachers are in fact worried about this. Ball and Lindsay (2013: 59), reporting from the Basque country situation, however, find that for teachers themselves, prosody became one among many considerations and particularly important is the subject teacher’s ability to facilitate learning. In what might be encouraging for many IBD subject teachers, they found clear feedback from students that pronunciation is important but what really matters is methodological awareness (ibid.). Moving on to an evaluation of the project in more general terms, we note that Wilkinson (Doiz et al. 2012: 3) identifies delivering courses in English as a way of enticing students, who may be excellent students, and raising the institution’s profile. In any case, whatever their calibre, students, possibly from other countries, will pay fees to the university. Leaving aside increased university earnings and market considerations, as pointed out by Shohamy (2013: 197): “the direct association of the prestigious academic knowledge and prestigious languages has been kept for a long time with very little resentment and criticism.” The Anglicisation of academic studies is, of course, proceeding rapidly in European and other countries. Ball and Lindsay (2013: 44) are among many writers who observe the tendency for higher education in general to become increasingly internationalised. This reflects among other factors the Bologna Declaration of 1999 which aimed to promote ”the creation of the European area of higher education as a key way to promote citizens’ mobility and employability and the Continent’s overall development” (The Bologna Process – Towards the European Higher Education area, quoted by Ball and Lindsay (2013: 44)). The main ideology and assumption behind using vehicular English is that the learning of academic subjects via another language is instrumental in enhancing language proficiency, given that learning employs meaningful

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content which in turn creates motivation to learn the language more efficiently (Shohamy 2013: 196). However, a frequently voiced opinion heard at the University of Parma, and other places, is that the economics department of a university is not a language school, and students should finish their high school curriculum having a solid foundation in English, or in some way obtain this foundation for themselves, before enrolling on any course, particularly one delivered in English. Given that language goals are disregarded in IBD and it is assumed that they are incidental, it is impossible to describe IBD as using CLIL. As noted by Tarja Nikula, Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Ana Llinares, CLIL classrooms are, by definition, educational contexts in which foreign language learning takes place (2013: 81). A more fitting description of current practice might be English Medium Instruction (EMI), or even the delightful phrase coined by Dalton-Puffer and quoted in Llinares et al. (2012: 8), i.e. a sort of “language bath”. The IBD students, as mentioned by Wilkinson (2013: 16), are perhaps the most important stakeholders in the project of EMI: “They expect their language competences to improve; they expect the content staff to speak and write reasonable English.” In Wilkinson’s environment, however, the role of developing the students’ knowledge of the language of the subject is delegated to language staff. This needs to be done more systematically for IBD, in order to make the bath perhaps a little bit warmer and more effective. Shohamy (2013: 203), however, asks whether content teachers delivering their course in English should have to devote time to language explanations. Subject teachers, of course, may not see themselves as language teachers. They may not be confident of their own language competence. Anecdotal evidence as well as intuition says that subject teachers might in fact have a high level of CALP, as a result of their own study or teaching experience overseas and conference attendance etc. But they are not so confident outside the context of the traditional formal lecture, in language involved in classroom management, questioning techniques, group dynamics and task design, not to mention assessment procedures. From the students’ point of view, there have already been explicit requests for language tuition by stragglers and by more enthusiastic students who may have been exposed to language provision at overseas universities on ERASMUS exchange programmes or similar programmes. The seminar on writing skills was received enthusiastically by IBD students, who were grateful for language input of any type.

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The involvement of tirocinanti was potentially a major strength in that it provided valuable practice in materials preparation for CLIL, one of the growing needs in Italian schools. Materials preparation was also a source of professional satisfaction and interest for several of the tirocinanti themselves. Given the complexity of interdepartmental collaboration and the high numbers of subject staff and students, the small number of team members and the fact that only two were academic staff was a major weakness. If more subject teaching staff had taken up the opportunity, it would not have been feasible to provide material. Because the leader was not from the Economics Department or Faculty, at that time responsible for IBD, the project did not have a high enough profile for subject teachers to fully appreciate it. In other Faculties, there was even misunderstanding as to whether team members were supposed to translate lessons for subject staff.

Proposals Course organisation and delivery involves numerous players, and coordination in our university tends to be patchy, especially with English language teaching staff. But some proposals fitting with the idea of continuous improvement on the part of individual players acting in course provision can be made. For course entry, from Academic Year 2014-15 all IBD students will be required to have a sufficient level of English language. Current thinking is that there will be an entry barrier test through recognised certificates of proficiency in English. There is obviously a decision to take between casting too fine a net and frightening applicants away, excluding too many on the grounds of their English, or making the net too coarse and accepting students who in fact only have the minimum level required for their previous studies. The decision will therefore not be taken only by EL staff or even subject teachers. It is hoped that it will be possible to assess applicants in a sound and robust manner, and that this will be perceived as a necessary measure by teachers who have frequently lamented the low level of the students’ English and, more importantly, by the students themselves. It will probably be perceived as a fair measure, especially if testing can be coordinated with the pre-sessional English Study Skills Course offering tuition in English for Academic Purposes. It would also be helpful to explicitly ask for any other courses in EAP at university level to be logistically tailored for IBD students.

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IBD currently includes Communication Skills (COD. 1004550) “Attività Formative Varie” (various trainee activities) for 3 CFU in the first year and the Prova Finale (final test) (Cod. 14250) of Attività Formative Prova Finale e Lingua Straniera (trainee activities, final test and foreign language) for 14 CFU. Using these courses and CFU, or part of them, for formal language provision, such as guidance on dissertation writing, or study skills, such as taking lecture notes, would be helpful. Training on academic writing or listening could follow IELTS training or similar types of courses. The institutional problem of the lack of recognised staff members needs to be solved. It would be over-ambitious to follow the example reported by Ball and Lindsay from the Basque country where EMI subject teachers are required to have a C1 level, and are helped to achieve it. A more realistic recommendation is for all subject teachers to have uncomplicated access to services of language experts. In the absence of fully trained personnel, assistance from language undergraduates under expert guidance would be useful to this end. There is also a lot of guidance on the Internet and elsewhere about presentation skills (e.g. http://library.leeds.ac.uk/skills-presentation#activ ate-planning_your_presentation), and websites such as the British http://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/ offer a rich variety of input for subject teachers. For the more specific purposes of the Parma IBD university classroom teacher and academic supervisor, the short file of self-access learning materials for EFAP available at www.cla.unipr.it (Clegg) may be useful for autonomous learning. Increased collaboration between subject and language experts is important. Teachers need to have the opportunity to request ELT presence in classroom in order to gain feedback on the language characteristics of their lessons. Even if the aim of CLIL is over-ambitious, there is a clear need for overall management at university level as a whole for services to EMI.

References Ball P. / D. Lindsay 2013. Language demands and support for Englishmedium instruction in tertiary education. Learning from the specific context. In A. Doiz / D. Lasagabaster / J.M Sierra (eds), EnglishMedium Instruction at Universities Global Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters: 44-49.

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Coyle D. / P. Hood / D. Marsh 2010. CLIL Content and Language Integrated Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doiz A. / D. Lasagabaster / J.M. Sierra (eds) 2013. English-Medium Instruction at Universities Global Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Llinares A. / T. Morton / R. Whittaker 2012. The Role of Languages in CLIL. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: Mezzadri M. 2009. CLIL courses and quality management at university level. In F. Sisti (ed.) 2009. CLIL Methodology in University Instruction: Online and in the Classroom. An Emerging Framework. Perugia: Guerra Edizioni: 203-212. Nikula T. / C. Dalton-Puffer / A. Llinares 2013. CLIL classroom discourse Research from Europe, Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 1/1: 70-100. Shohamy E. 2013. A critical perspective on the use of English as a medium of instruction at universities. In A. Doiz / D. Lasagabaster / J.M Sierra (eds), English-Medium Instruction at Universities Global Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters: 196-212. Sisti F. (ed.) 2009. CLIL Methodology in University Instruction: Online and in the Classroom. An Emerging Framework. Perugia: Guerra Edizioni. Wilkinson R. 2013. English-medium instruction at a Dutch University: challenges and pitfalls. In A. Doiz / D. Lasagabaster / J.M Sierra (eds), English-Medium Instruction at Universities Global Challenges. Bristol: Multilingual Matters: 3-26. Zydatiß W. 2012. Linguistic thresholds in the CLIL classroom? The threshold hypothesis revisited. International CLIL Research Journal 1/4: 17-28. At http://www.icrj.eu/14/article2.html.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ERFAHRUNGEN MIT DEM CLIL-UNTERRICHT: CASE-STUDY FINNLAND ANNIKKI KOSKENSALO UNIVERSITY OF TURKU, FINLAND

Einleitung und Problemstellung Die integrierte Vermittlung von (fremd)sprachlichen Fertigkeiten und nicht-linguistischen Fachinhalten wird in globalen Bildungskontexten immer mehr beachtet. Der Ansatz des integrierten Sprach- und Fachlernens bzw. -unterrichts (CLIL=Content and Language Integrated Learning) hat eine über 2000jährige Geschichte. Dieser CLIL-Ansatz ist nach Haataja (2010: 1047) im Zuge ständig steigender internationaler Mobilität, Globalisierung, Internationalisierung und dementsprechend daraus erwachsenden, teils völlig neuartigen Herausforderungen in der Bildungspolitik bzw. -planung zu einem transversalen Entwicklungsthema in Finnland geworden. In vielen Ländern ist das Fremdsprachenlernen heute in einer Krise. CLIL – im Tertiär-Bereich als ICLHE nach Costa (2009: 85) bezeichnet – bietet eine Alternative, welche potentiell zu einer Lösung dieses Problems führen könnte, weil nach Johansson-Terlevic (2011: 8) das fremdsprachliche und besonders das mündliche Kommunikationsvermögen der LernerInnen gestärkt wird. Die Globalisierung Mitte der 90er Jahre stellte Anforderungen an das Fremdsprachenlernen. Englisch ist zur globalen lingua franca Nr. 1 avanciert. Der Lernende sollte weiters eine andere Sprache (eines Nachbarlandes) außer seiner Muttersprache und Englisch beherrschen. Die Welt ist ein globales Dorf geworden, wo man sich sowohl physisch als auch virtuell bewegt. CLIL ist – wie Mehisto / Frigols / Marsh (2008: 10) und Meriläinen (2008: 10f.) anmerken – innovativ und bietet viele Möglichkeiten, die den Anforderungen und Aufforderungen der modernen Welt entsprechen. Der Mensch entwickelt sich allmählich in seinem

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persönlichen und beruflichen Leben lokal, national und international so, dass seine kulturelle Identität einerseits von Globalisierung und anderseits von Lokalisierung beeinflusst wird. Aber er ist nach Jäppinen (2006: 148) auch imstande, die Anforderungen der Globalisierung im Rahmen seiner jeweiligen Möglichkeiten zu beherrschen. In Finnland ist man bezüglich Englisch schon sehr weit fortgeschritten. So schreibt z.B. Buchberger (2002: 185), dass die jungen FinnInnen fähig sind, in Englisch zu kommunizieren, weil Englisch den Status einer ersten oder zweiten Fremdsprache in den Lehrplänen der Grund- und weiterführenden Schulen besitzt. Jäppinen (2005: 150) führt an, dass Englisch die meistgebrauchte CLIL-Sprache ist, weil sie als lingua franca in vielen finnischen Unternehmen und internationalen Kontexten verwendet wird. Danach kommt Schwedisch, weniger im Gebrauch sind Deutsch, Französisch und Russisch. Kovanen (2011: 10) nennt weitere Gründe für die Stärkung des Englischen in Finnland: starke Veränderungen in den IK-Technologien, das Internet, Englisch als lingua franca im Geschäfts- und Berufsbereich und sehr wichtig ist heutzutage, dass Englisch als Zweitsprache in den Massenmedien benutzt wird und Fernsehen und Filmindustrie Untertitel in englischsprachigen Filmen und Fernsehserien verwenden. Der CLILFokus in Finnland hat sich im Laufe der Zeit verändert, wie Finch (2009: 107) anmerkt, wenn zwar Immersion in Vaasa auf die Bedürfnisse der Schwedisch sprechenden, an der Ostküste lebenden Gemeinde ausgerichtet ist, Englisch hingegen schon lange eine normale Kommunikationssprache in Helsinki war. Als zentrale Forschungsfrage sei formuliert: Welchen Beitrag leistet CLIL zum Fremdsprachenunterricht (dessen Verankerung und genereller Entwicklungslinien vgl. Haataja o. J. : 4-11) in Finnland? Die folgende relevante Hypothese ist genauer zu untersuchen: Ein Unterrichtskonzept wie CLIL, welches integriertes Inhalts- und Sprachlernen anbietet, fördert nach Breidbach (2007: 37) die Erziehung zur Dreisprachigkeit bei finnischen SchülerInnen im Sinne des Europäischen Sprach-Portfolios. So argumentiert etwa Harrop (2012: 57), dass CLIL zu einer größeren Sprachtüchtigkeit führe, weil es die Motivation steigert, passend für alle Lern(er)-Fähigkeiten ist und zu einem höheren interkulturellen Bewusstsein führt. Präziser formuliert bedeutet dies, dass CLIL nach Gefäll (2009: 91f.) erstaunliche Resultate im Fremdsprachenlernen wie die Reduzierung von Sprachängsten, den Erwerb fachspezifischen Vokabulars, die Erlangung großer Redeflüssigkeit und bei extensivem CLIL-Gebrauch fast muttersprachliche rezeptive Sprachkenntnisse bei einer großen Mehrheit von Schülern ermöglicht. Zugleich relativiert Harrop (2012: 65) und schränkt ein, dass CLIL zwar das Potential hat, zu

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einem besseren Sachverständnis zu führen und insgesamt das Leistungsvermögen zu heben, aber nur wenn CLIL in den Kontext einer optimalen Unterrichtspraxis eingebettet wird, welche Sprach- wie Fachentwicklung einbezieht. Allerdings garantiert die bloße Integration von Sprache und Inhalt im Klassenunterricht noch lange nicht Erfolg, weswegen Snow / Met / Genesee (1989: 204) schon früh die Spezifizierung von Sprachzielen, eine sorgfältige, systematische Planung und Koordination des Sprach- und Fachlehrplans, welche durch die Lehrer realisiert werden muss, fordern. Ob damit etwa nach Thürmann (2000: 75) das Dilemma des bilingualen Fachunterrichts, nämlich didaktische und methodische Unklarheiten und eine fehlende Didaktik und Methodik des bilingualen Unterrichts (vgl. Meyer 2003: 24; Haataja 2009: 9) bzw. einer nachvollziehbaren und integrierten CLIL-Methodologie (vgl. Meyer 2010: 11; integrierte Programme vgl. Perez-Vidal 2007: 44) – von wenigen Versuchen (vgl. Hallet 1998: 115-125; Coyle / Hood / Marsh 2010: 48-152) einmal abgesehen – gelöst wird, soll hier – wenn auch nur ansatzweise – untersucht werden bzw. bleibt weiterer Forschung und Theoriebildung vorbehalten. Trotzdem verbleibt wie Ting (2007: 3) anzumerken, dass CLIL als Ansatz eine eigene tragfähige theoretische Basis entwickeln muss. Breidbach (2007: 78) resümiert, dass weder das Immersions- noch das Vehikel-Sprach- bzw. das Bi-Kulturalismus-Modell als alleinig-didaktisches Modell für den Sachfachunterricht taugen. Nach Wolff (2007: 1) stellt sich die didaktische Kernfrage im CLIL-Kontext (= Frage nach Integration von Inhalt und Sprache) sogar doppelt: Wie funktioniert die gleichzeitige Förderung von Sachfach- und Sprachwissen?

Definitionsproblematik von CLIL Coyle / Hood / Marsh (2010: 1) definieren CLIL als “dual-focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language”. Dieser doppelt fokussierende CLIL-Ansatz schenkt nach Mehisto / Frigols / Marsh (2008: 1) Inhalt und Sprache die gleiche Aufmerksamkeit. Bonces (2012: 180) beschreibt dies treffend: “The language is used as a tool to learn the contents of the subject, and those contents are used as a meaningful medium to learn and use the language communicatively.” Wolff (2012: 107f.) sieht das ähnlich, aber letztlich kritisch: “It does not say much about methodological aspects, for example about how to transform the dual focus mentioned in the definition into a concrete methodology.” Der

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CLIL-Begriff vereint in seiner generischen Funktion eine Vielzahl von europäischen ländertypisch dispers akzentuierten Unterrichtsformen, welche die Nutzung einer Fremdsprache zwecks Vermittlung und Verarbeitung von sachfachlichen Inhalten beinhalten. Dieser CLIL-Begriff wird im anglo-sächsischen Sprachgebrauch und in Europa verwendet, wobei er zwar nach Zydatiß (2007: 40) die Interdependenz zwischen den beiden Bezugspolen (Inhalt und Sprache) deutlich macht, aber auch Organisationsformen und Lern-Arrangements offen lässt. Dalton-Puffer (2011: 182) definiert kurz und prägnant: “CLIL could be interpreted as a foreign language enrichment measure packaged into content teaching.” Das Akronym CLIL wurde erstmals 1994 (vgl. Marsh / Frigols 2007: 34; Marsh /Maljers /Hartiala: 3) bzw. nach Marsh (2006: 32) 1996 in Europa geprägt und nach Mehisto / Frigols / Marsh (2008: 1) als Dach-Begriff (aus der Sicht des Bilingualen Unterrichtsbegriffs vgl. Schönfeldt (2005: 31); im Original bei Lenz (2002: 2)) für verschiedenste Unterrichtskonzepte wie etwa “immersion, bilingual education, multilingual education, language showers and enriched language programmes“ (Mehisto / Frigols / Marsh 2008: 1), welche nach Sudhoff (2011: 1) auf eine Verknüpfung von Fremdsprachen- und Sachfachlernen abzielen. So definiert der EURYDICE-Bericht (2004/05: 8) der Europäischen Kommission CLIL als Begriff “to describe all types of provision in which a second language … is used to teach certain subjects in the curriculum other than the language lessons themselves”. Allerdings wird die Definitionsproblematik durch folgende Faktoren erschwert: so wird dieser CLIL-Dachbegriff wie schon angedeutet nach wie vor in den europäischen Ländern in verschiedensten konzeptionellen Ausprägungen in die Praxis umgesetzt, welche sich jeweils abhängig von den spezifisch-linguistischen Situationen in den einzelnen Ländern entwickelt haben. Zudem verfolgt CLIL in den jeweiligen Ländern einen anderen Fokus. Was die Angelegenheit weiter erschwert, liegt darin begründet, dass abhängig vom jeweiligen Sprachstatus in einem mehrsprachigen Land die methodischen Ansätze variieren. Weiters beeinflussen die verschiedenen Schulsysteme in Europa, dass das jeweilige Verständnis von CLIL als Sprachlernkonzept variabel ist (vgl. Lamsfuß-Schenk/Wolff 1999: 1). So ist es kein Wunder, wenn Cenoz / Genesee / Gorter (2013: 5) kritisieren, dass der Aktionsradius nicht klar abgegrenzt ist und folglich die Kern-Charakteristika nicht klar definiert werden können. Es ist allerdings Lamsfuß-Schenk / Wolff (1999: 2) nach wie vor zuzustimmen, dass es nicht sinnvoll ist, alle vorhin angesprochenen Zugänge auf ein einziges Konzept von CLIL zu reduzieren, weil vielmehr

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die Stärke von CLIL gerade in seiner Diversität begründet liegt. Dies erlaubt nämlich weiterhin mit verschiedenen Sachfächern zu experimentieren, verschiedene methodische Zugänge zu erproben und Lernern unterschiedlicher Altersstufen differenzierte Angebote zu machen.

Erfahrungen mit CLIL in Finnland: Ein Fallbeispiel Die finnische CLIL-Geschichte hängt sehr eng mit den relevanten Erfahrungen in Kanada zusammen, welche für Finnland in Teilen ein nachahmenswertes Muster dargestellt haben, weswegen hier kurz auf diesbezügliche kanadische Verhältnisse einzugehen ist. Es soll hier – nicht zuletzt wegen der gebotenen Kürze – bloß skizzenhaft versucht werden, dem Fallbeispiel Finnland mit logischerweise starken lokalen Perspektiven eine Langzeit-Perspektive, Vergleichsdaten und Forschungsresultate, individuell-bezogene Elemente der Klassenforschung, allgemeine effektive Kern-Charakteristika, verstärkt-verbesserte Reliabilität und Validität und globale Perspektiven und theoretische Rahmenbedingungen beizustellen (vgl. Björklund 2006: 194, Figure 2).

Die damalige Situation in Kanada Gegen Mitte der 60er Jahre des 20. Jahrhunderts hat man angefangen, Lehrstoffe in einer fremden Sprache zu unterrichten, weil das Land offiziell zweisprachig (Englisch und Französisch) wurde. Dadurch wurde erstens die nationale Zusammengehörigkeit gestärkt. Zweitens sollte durch die Französisch-Immersion die angesprochene Zweisprachigkeit in Kanada verstärkt werden. Das Sprachbad (immersion) begann man 1965 nicht zuletzt aufgrund der Frustration an der Eltern-Basis wegen des Versagens des traditionellen Französisch-Unterrichts bei ihren Kindern in der Schule St. Lambert (St. Lambert French Immersion Programme) in Ontario (vgl. Coyle / Hood / Marsh 2008: 2-8; Genesee 1987: 12f.; Schönfeld 2005: 17-20). Der Anfang war schwer, denn sowohl das geeignete Unterrichtsmaterial wie auch die Lehrmethoden fehlten. Man ging davon aus, dass die Lernenden Französisch verstanden und dann allmählich auch Französisch sprechen konnten. Dann kamen Schreiben und Lesen. Bald wurde dieses Programm ein Erfolg und verbreitete sich in Kanada und auch in anderen Teilen der Welt (vgl. Mehisto / Frigols / Marsh 2008: 10; Meriläinen 2008: 14). Allerdings vermerkt Gajo (2001: 10) beim Ländervergleich KanadaFinnland kritisch, dass die Didaktik der Immersion sprachorientiert, während diejenige von CLIL eher inhaltsorientiert sei. Die beigebrachte

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kommunikative Kompetenz im Immersionsunterricht ist eher strategisch, während diejenige im CLIL eher diskursiv ist. Haataja (2007: 6) sieht den größten Unterschied zwischen Immersion und CLIL darin, dass CLIL sich vor allem auf Sprache und Fach orientiert und es bei CLIL nicht primär um die fremdsprachige Vermittlung von Fachinhalten, sondern auch um ein konstruktiv-synergetisches Nebeneinander beider im Unterricht beteiligter Sprachen geht. Der kanadische Immersionsversuch gilt insgesamt als eines der bestuntersuchten Unterrichtskonzepte überhaupt mit über eintausend Untersuchungen und figuriert nach Wedel (2010: 154f.) als Modell für die Lösung der Aufgaben zur Europäischen Mehrsprachigkeit. Allerdings wenden Marsh et al. (o. J.: 5) ein, dass 3000 Studien in Kanada keine direkte Relevanz auf die Einführung von CLIL in den finnischnationalen Kontext haben. So haben die Finnen sich zwar nach dem kanadischen Modell orientiert, aber doch nach ihrem nationalen Kontext adaptiert bzw. modifiziert, d.h., einen eigenen CLIL-Pfad beschritten, nicht zuletzt nach Sahlberg (2007: 165) wegen des in Finnland permanent gepflegten pädagogischen Konservatismus, allerdings kombiniert mit einer angstfreien Lernatmosphäre und damit erzielten guten Resultaten. Die zwei HauptForschungszentren für CLIL-Ausbildung und -Forschung befinden sich nach Marsh et al. (o.J.: 6f.) in Jyväskylä und Vaasa, wobei letzteres sich primär nach dem Modell Kanada (=Immersionsmethoden mit speziellem Bezug auf Schwedisch) orientiert. In Jyväskylä orientiert man sich zwar ebenfalls nach dem kanadischen Modell, aber auch nach südostasiatischen Ländern wie Brunei, Hong Kong und Singapore mit spezieller SprachOrientierung auf Englisch (98%) und Deutsch (2%).

Zur CLIL-Erfolgsgeschichte in Finnland Das erste Schwedisch-Immersionsprogramm auf Basis des kanadischen und nach 1989 katalanischen Modells (vgl. JohanssonTerlevic 2011: 13f.) wurde im Herbst 1987 als Pionierprojekt auf Betreiben von Prof. Christer und Ulla Laurén (vgl. Nieminen 2006: 5), einem finnischen Journalisten und finnischen Frauen in einem Kindergarten von Vaasa eingeführt (vgl. Lauren 1994: 5f.). Christer Laurén (2006: 45f.) erkannte sehr bald, dass es neben den in Sachen Immersion nicht nur theoretisch sehr versierten Kanadiern, von denen er das Straßen-&Innenhof-Modell mit richtiger Kommunikation und Interaktion der Französisch und Englisch sprechenden Kinder (= Sprachbad) übernommen hat, in Europa, genauer in Katalonien, Immersionsprogramme mit einem klaren Fokus auf qualitative Aspekte,

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Immersionspädagogik und Schulklassenprozesse gab, welche sich in Barcelona nach der Ära von Rosa Sensat vor über 100 Jahren, Maria Montessori noch vor dem spanischen Bürgerkrieg, Gaudi, Miró, Picasso und den anderen anarcho-syndikalistischen Bewegungen in Katalonien orientierte. Katalanische Ideen wie Authentizität des Materials und Faches, Schüler-Autonomie und nicht von oben geleitete Lehrer-Arbeit hat dann Laurén in Vaasa für sein Projekt übernommen. Jäppinen (2005: 149) erläutert in Sachen CLIL die Pionier-Rolle Finnlands für Europa im öffentlichen Schulunterricht genauer und berichtet, dass 1996 acht Prozent der finnischen Volks- und 15 Prozent der weiterführenden Mainstream-Schulen eine Fremdsprache wie etwa Englisch oder andere Sprachen (s.u.) als Instruktionsinstrument eingesetzt haben. So hat man Haataja (o.J.: 10) zufolge bei der Adaption des kanadischen Immersionsmodells in Finnland a priori berücksichtigt, dass Immersionsschüler möglichst früh in der Schule mit einer weiteren, nicht heimischen Sprache konfrontiert werden. Dieses Immersionsprogramm diente dann als Prototyp für die anderen, nachfolgenden lokalen Programme dieser Art. Während der 1990er Jahre verbreiteten sich diese Programme stark und sind heutzutage in 13 Städten an der westlichen und südlichen Küstenlinie Finnlands in Verwendung, wobei mit Stand 2009 ca. 4.500 Studenten diese Programme absolviert haben. In Vaasa, Turku und Helsinki kann sogar die bestehende Nachfrage leider nicht mehr abgedeckt werden, sodass nach Björklund (2011: 14f. u. 22) die freien Plätze wie bei einer Lotterie verlost werden. 1996 betrug der CLIL-Anteil an Primär-, Unter- und Ober-Sekundärschulen 11,7 Prozent, während er trotz seiner früheren Pionier-Rolle 2005 auf 5,7 Prozent abgefallen ist (vgl. Wewer 2013: 77). Typologisch und statistisch wird nach Eurydice / Eurostat (2012: 18, 39 u. 43) Finnland im Europa-Vergleich, was den CLIL-Ansatz im Primarund/oder im allgemeinbildenden Sekundarbereich 2010/2011 als letztverfügbare Statistik-Referenz anbetrifft, wie die Masse der anderen europäischen Länder als ein Land mit CLIL-Unterricht an einigen Schulen klassifiziert. Das bedeutet, dass der Unterricht nach dem CLIL-Ansatz trotz seiner früheren Hochphase nicht unbedingt weit verbreitet ist. Was die Zulassungskriterien für den CLIL-Unterricht an besagten finnischen Schulen anbelangt, so beziehen sich diese auf die Vorkenntnisse der Schüler, wobei sie neben den Sprachkenntnissen auch der Motivation der Schüler großes Gewicht beimessen. Diese Programme wurden 2004 nur von einem halben Prozent aller Schüler Finnlands belegt. Haapanen et al. (2012: 8) fordern eine kontinuierliche, systematische Entwicklung von CLIL, um gute, innovative Praktiken von CLIL in der höheren Bildung

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einzuführen, und warnen nicht unberechtigt, dass CLIL sich um eine kleine Gruppe interessierter Parteien konzentriert, obwohl es an sich einem weiteren Kreis zugänglich gemacht werden sollte. Auch Jäppinen (2006: 33) weist auf ein Desiderat bei der Erwachsenen- und Berufsbildung (Beispiele für letztere vgl. Kaseva / Schwartz 2006: 7-12 u. 22f.) hin. Finnland gilt mit seinen zwei Landes- bzw. Amtssprachen (Finnisch und Schwedisch) als ein Vorzeigeland des CLIL-Unterrichts, wobei sich nach Lapkin / Cummins (1984: 60) das primär praktizierte Modell als early partial immersion beschreiben lässt und vor allem aus sprachlichen Gründen zwecks Förderung der Schwedisch-Kenntnisse von FinnischSprechern eingeführt wurde (vgl. Johansson-Terlevic 2011: 15). In Finnland existieren in diesem Zusammenhang laut Buchberger (2002: 199) drei Hauptgruppen: 1. Amtssprachen (Finnisch, Schwedisch und Sami), 2. Fremdsprachen (z. B. Englisch, Deutsch, Französisch, Russisch) und 3. Immigrantensprachen (wie etwa Estnisch, Somalisch). Der finnische Immersionsunterricht hat nach Laakso (2007: 2-5) die balancierte Mehrsprachigkeit der Lerner zum Ziel, wobei die Teilnahme daran freiwillig und für alle Schüler ohne Schwedisch-Vorkenntnisse möglich ist. So läuft anfangs ab dem Kindergarten der gesamte Unterricht in L2 Schwedisch ab und führt nach einigen Jahren die L1 (= Finnisch) ein, welche dann kontinuierlich mehr Unterrichtszeit erhält. Ab Ende der Primärstufe sind L1 und L2 bezogen auf Unterrichtsstunden gleich (=50 : 50). Die Auswirkung des Immersionsunterrichts wird ständig evaluiert, wobei die Resultate der Tests zeigen, dass die Lexikonproduktion der jüngeren Schüler derjenigen der Produktion der schwedischsprachigen Kontrollgruppe quantitativ mit gewissen qualitativen Einschränkungen bei der lexikalischen Variation sehr ähnlich ist. Die älteren Schüler sind aber auch noch keine balancierten Bilingualen. Sie weisen vielmehr interimssprachige Züge auf; wie etwa häufig verwendete Paraphrasen. Die Immersionsschüler beherrschen die L1 Finnisch genauso gut und zeitweilig sogar besser als die Finnisch sprechenden Kontroll-Schüler (vgl. Johansson-Terlevic 2011: 16 u. 18; Järvinen 1999: 137; Björklund 2011: 13-31). Neben den Minoritätssprachen werden auch Fremdsprachen wie z. B. Englisch als Unterrichtsmedium im bilingualen Unterricht in Finnland eingesetzt. Das finnische Bildungsministerium beabsichtigte Marsh / Masih (1996: 46f.) zufolge spätestens 1996 in der Grundschule bzw. im Gymnasium in allen Provinzen Finnlands bilinguale Programme in einer Fremdsprache einzuführen. Allerdings hat Buchberger (2002: 48) zufolge das finnische National Board of Education einmal versucht, die rasche Verbreitung von CLIL-Versuchen in finnischen Kindergärten und auf

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anderen Ebenen des finnischen Schul- und Bildungssystems (vgl. Schroeder 2010: 171-183; Sarjala / Häkli 2008; Eurydice 2004/05: 3-13; DIPF 2007:1) zu behindern. Buchberger (2002: 197) stellt fest, dass Immersion heutzutage in Finnland die meistgebrauchte fortschrittliche Unterrichtsmethode ist, und sie bemerkt anschließend, dass oft die Immersionssprache Englisch und nicht mehr wie anfänglich Schwedisch ist. Buchberger (2002: 200) bewertet die Rolle von Englisch, welches als globale Sprache intensive Diskussionen über die Zukunft kleiner Sprachen evoziert hat, und sie stellt fest, dass die Englisch-Plus-Sprachpolitik in Finnland es bis jetzt zustande gebracht hat, ein sicheres Leben im Schatten dieser globalen Sprache zu garantieren. Englisch ist ein integraler Teil des Globalisierungsprozesses geworden. Wie widerstandsfähig nationale Amtssprachen und nationale wie auch lokale Bildungssysteme in dieser Entwicklung sein werden, bleibt eine offene Frage. Pehkonen (2008: 10) stellt fest: “English is the target language that is most often used in Finnish CLIL, with 80% to 90% of schools offering CLIL using it as the medium of teaching.” Haapanen et al. (2012: 1) warnen nicht umsonst, dass Deutsch und Französisch sich in Finnland in einem besorgniserregenden Niedergang befinden und man sich von daher seitens der Sprachbildungspolitik sensibel verhalten muss. Nikula (2007: 209) zufolge hat CLIL seine modische Attraktivität verloren und befindet sich nunmehr in einer Konsolidierungsphase, obwohl natürlich die Qualität des CLIL-Unterrichts verbessert werden konnte. Bezüglich Forschungsstand existieren mit Ausnahme der Querschnittsstudie von Järvinen (1999) zum Erwerb englischer Syntax durch finnische Grundschüler (Klassen 3-5) sehr wenige wissenschaftliche Studien zu diesen Immersionsprogrammen. Van de Craen et al. (2007: 70) merken an, dass die CLIL-Forschung hauptsächlich als Politik-geleitete Forschung zu bezeichnen sei, was natürlich im Falle Finnlands einer genaueren Untersuchung bedürfte. Marsh (2012: 107) weist zudem auf das Desiderat hin, dass zwar viel CLIL-Forschung hinsichtlich Sprachentwicklung durchgeführt worden ist, aber wenig über die Verschmelzung von Sprachentwicklung und FachLernen oder über das Fach-Lernen selbst. Schon 25 Prozent Immersionsunterricht üben eine positive Wirkung auf das implizite Sprachlernen aus, wobei die Resultate auf bessere und teilweise andersartige Lernerfolge von Immersionsschülern im Vergleich zur Kontrollgruppe mit traditionellem Englischunterricht hindeuten. Die Immersionsschüler können nach Järvinen (1999: 137) im Gegensatz zu den Kontroll-Schülern sowohl längere als auch komplexere Sätze und

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schon nach 3 Jahren bilingualen Unterrichts (= am Ende der 3. Klasse) syntaktisch komplette Sätze bilden. Nikula / Dalton-Puffer / Llinares (2013: 72) betrachten den Forschungsgegenstand CLIL als ein Phänomen mit vielen Facetten, wobei sie den Gegenstand so skizzieren, dass die Forschung auf diverse Bedarfsträger, verschiedene, für CLIL-relevante Gebiete und ganzheitlich zugleich sowohl auf Makro- wie auch auf Mikro-Perspektiven ausgerichtet sein muss. Zur Erfolgsgeschichte des CLIL-Unterrichts in Finnland tragen nicht zuletzt auch folgende Faktoren bei, wie sie Marsh (2012: 101) aufzählt: die Unterrichtsqualität bei angereicherten Lern-Umgebungen, der gleiche Bildungszugang (vgl. Sahlberg (2012: 20-40) und die gleiche Relevanz von Methodologien und Inhalt. Marsh (2012: 102) erläutert genauer, dass Finnland auf eine Strategie mit dezentralisierter Autorität baut und Lehrer so zu mehr Autonomie und Flexibilität (vgl. genauer Sahlberg 2007: 152) ermächtigt. Das nationale finnische Kern-Curriculum dient nur als ein Rahmenwerk, ist nicht im strengen Sinne vorschreibend und stark auf lokalen Ebenen entwickelt. Dies gibt nach Marsh (2012: 102) Direktoren und Lehrern einen großen Freiraum und die Unabhängigkeit, zu entscheiden, wie und was sie lehren wollen. Marsh (2012: 102) fügt an: “The same holds true of accountability and performance monitoring, which is primarily handled by individual schools.” Marsh (2012: 103) bringt den Grund des CLIL-Erfolges in Finnland auf den Punkt, dass der finnische Zentrallehrplan zugleich integrativ und Kompetenz-orientiert und die Umwelt darauf ausgerichtet ist, innovationsfreundlich zu sein. Marsh et al. (o.J.: 3) bewerten die unkomplizierte, offen-unbefangene, unorthodoxe, klassisch-finnischpragmatische Herangehensweise an den CLIL-Begriff als Grund für dessen beispielhafte Umsetzung in die finnische Unterrichtspraxis: In Finland, CLIL has not been “pinned down” by any narrow or explicit definitions, and it has, at least up till now, escaped any narrow “orthodoxy” in terms of its goals and methodology. CLIL has been interpreted in a broad sense, to cover the use of a foreign language in teaching ranging from very short units or substantial courses, or varying degrees of the curricula. There has been no a priori preference for having language teachers teaching content or subject teachers using a foreign language in their teaching. It has been recognized that the reasons for introducing teaching through a foreign language may be diverse and reflect contextual constraints and priorities.

Wenn also hier von finnischen Bildungsprinzipien wie Flexibilität und lockeren Standards, einem breiten Lernansatz kombiniert mit Kreativität

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und einsichtsvoller Verantwortlichkeit mit vertrauensgestützter Professionalität, überdacht mit einer konservativen Pädagogik (vgl. Sahlberg 2007: 152 u. 165) die Rede ist, dann kann nicht – auȕer vielleicht auf den ersten Blick – von einer Unsichtbarkeit bzw. Nicht-Existenz der Sprachpolitik an finnischen Universitäten (vgl. Smit 2013: 19) bezogen auf das Thema CLIL gesprochen werden. Es ist natürlich interessant – aber verfrüht – darüber zu spekulieren, ob dann im Frühling 2016 im nationalen Zentrallehrplan angesichts der Diversität der CLIL-Anwendungen, inkonsistenter CLIL-Modelle und fehlender Sprachziele das finnische Unterrichtsministerium im Lichte der bisherigen Erfolge im CLIL-Bereich (s. u.) transparente, teilnahmemotivierende und demokratische Formulierungen (vgl. Wewer 2013: 78) zum Thema CLIL wie etwa bezüglich der Installierung einer CLIL-LehrerInnen-Ausbildung (vgl. genauer Haataja 2007: 38) oder relevanten Sprachzielen finden wird. Als exzellent bzw. best practices für den CLIL-Unterricht (vgl. Kiiskinen 2007: 40-54) und regionale Aktivitäten in Finnland im Zeitraum 1994-2012 führt Marsh (2012: 103) folgende Faktoren an: peer-led learning for teachers and principals involving collaborative practice, decentralizing of pedagogical rights to schools & teachers, the creation of additional support mechanisms for educators, and supporting system-sponsored experimentation and innovation across schools.

Jäppinen (2005: 163) resümiert, dass eine anspruchsvolle, sprachangereicherte Lernumwelt einen positiven Effekt auf die kognitive Entwicklung des sich im finnischen Mainstream befindlichen Lerners hat. Im Vergleich dazu fordern sehr ähnlich Tardieu / Doltisky (2012: 20) im Falle ihres taskbased CLIL-approach: Subject teachers and language teachers work together; the teachers adopt a task-based approach which motivates students … to communicate content in (a) foreign language … (and to) adopt positive assessment both for content and language to build … confidence in their abilities.

Schluss und Ausblick Weitere zentrale Forschungsfragen bleiben Eurydice (2004/05: 12) zufolge nach wie vor auf dem Tisch, nämlich: what really occurs in classrooms for CLIL in terms of interaction between teachers and pupils or students, and the teaching and learning of content and subject matter. And how can the learning of language and content be

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integrated more effectively, while using the foreign (or target) language to promote and assess how students have progressed in their acquisition of content-specific and general thinking skills.

Jäppinen (2005: 33) fordert, dass bei CLIL-Forschungen die Steigerung des Fach-Könnens der LehrerInnen, Qualität des Sach- und Fach-Lernens und die Entwicklung der CLIL-Lernumwelt stets im Blick behalten werden sollen. CLIL hat sich als methodische Annäherungsweise erwiesen, womit das Lernen der SchülerInnen, die kognitive Entwicklung und Lernresultate gefördert werden. Der CLIL-Unterricht sollte jedoch im nationalen Lehrplan klarer konturiert sein. Was aber noch zu leisten ist: es bedarf neuer Herangehensweisen bei einer Mehrsprachigkeits- und Tertiär-Sprach-Didaktik, welche bewusst den Sprachvergleich fokussiert. Denn daraus ergeben sich meta-sprachliche sowie -kognitive Aspekte, welche ebenso auf den Sprach(en)erwerb wie auf die Sprachverwendung ausgerichtet sind. Sarter (2013: 104) bedauert, dass deren Umsetzung im Unterricht jedoch wegen einer über weite Strecken noch traditionell auf Einzelsprachen ausgerichteten Ausbildung der FremdsprachenLehrerInnen bis dato noch nicht systematischer Bestandteil vom Fremdsprachenunterricht geworden ist. Welchen Beitrag nun CLIL zum Fremdsprachenunterricht in Finnland leistet, kann – wie oben gezeigt – mit den gemachten Erfahrungen (vgl. Björklund 2010: 4-16) und damit auch ihrer Erfolgsgeschichte (s.o.) nunmehr etwas genauer beantwortet werden. Nichtsdestotrotz gibt es einen beständigen Optimierungs- und Nachjustierungsbedarf. Zudem bestehen beim Forschungsgegenstand noch viele Desiderata (s.o.), sodass die Empirie-Resultat-geleitete Theoriebildung (s.o.) und die Methodologieentwicklung (s.o.) weiter voranzutreiben ist. Auf jeden Fall hat der CLIL-Ansatz noch ein beträchtliches innovatives Potential, welches durch den Ideenreichtum, die Experimentierfreudigkeit, das Engagement und die Professionalität finnischer LehrerInnen (vgl. genauer Sahlberg 2007: 147) weiter auszuschöpfen sein wird. Der CLIL-Ansatz stellt somit nach Blazkova Srsnova (2009:158) eine wertvolle Bereicherung bzw. Ergänzung des traditionellen Fremdsprachunterrichts dar und hilft, letzteren abwechslungsreicher zu gestalten und die Beschränkungen der traditionellen Curricula überwinden und überbrücken zu können.

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Laakso J. 2007. Sprachimmersion in einer Minderheitssprache. Erfahrungen aus Finnland. Wiener elektronische Beiträge des Instituts für Finno-Ugristik, 1-5. Zugriff: http://webfu.univie.ac.at/texte/laakso1.pdf. Lamsfuß-Schenk S. / D. Wolff 1999. Bilingualer Sachfachunterrricht: Fünf kritische Anmerkungen zum state of the art. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 4/2: o. S. Zugriff: http://zif.spz.tu-darmstadt.de/jg-04-2/beitrag/lamsfus2.htm. Lapkin S. / J. Cummins 1984. Canadian French immersion education: current administrative and instructional practices. In Studies on Immersion Education: A Collection of United States Educators. Sacramento: California State Department of Education: 58-86. Laurén C. 1994. Preface. In C. Laurén (Hg.), Evaluating European Immersion Programs. From Catalonia to Finland. Vaasa University: Vaasa: 3-9. —. 2006. Swedish for Finnish speakers, and an integrated theory. In A. Abel / M. Stuflesser / M. Putz (Hgg.), Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Erfahrungen, Bedürfnisse, Gute Praxis. Bozen: Europäische Akademie Bozen: 43-48. Zugriff: www.eurac.edu. Lenz T. 2002. Bilingualer Geographieunterricht im Spannungsfeld von Sachfachund Fremdsprachendidaktik – eine kritische Positionsbestimmung aus geographiedidaktischer Sicht. Geographie und Schule 24/137: 2-12. Marsh D. 2012. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): A Development Trajectory. Cordoba: University of Cordoba. Zugriff: https://www.google.it/?gws_rd=cr&ei=aiC3Ut3lJuPnywOTpoKYCw# q=de+Zarobe+R.+and+R.+Jim%C3%A9nez+Catal%C3%A1n+(eds.)+ 2010.+Content+and+Language+Integrated+Learning+%E2%80%93+ Evidence+from+Research+in+Europe. —. 2006. English as medium of instruction in the new global linguistic order: global characteristics, local consequences. METSMaC, 29-38. Zugriff: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.125.2388&r ep=rep1&type=pdf. Marsh D. / M. J. Frigols 2007. CLIL as a catalyst for change in languages education. Babylonia 3: 33-37. Marsh D. / J. Masih 1996. Teaching content through a foreign language in Finland. In G. Fruhauf / D. Coyle / I. Christ (Hgg.), Teaching Content in a Foreign Language. Alkmaar: European Platform for Dutch Education: 45-66.

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Marsh D. et al. 1994. Language Teacher Training and Bilingual Education in Finland. Sub-project 6, European Language Council. Zugriff: http://www.celelc.org/projects/Past_Projects/TNP_Languages/TNP1_r esources/SP6NatRepFI.pdf?1372922388. Mehisto P. / M. J. Frigols / D. Marsh 2008. Uncovering CLIL: Content and Language Integrated Learning in Bilingual and Multilingual Education. Oxford, UK: Macmillan. Mehisto P. / M. J. Frigols / D. Marsh 2008. The Many Faces of CLIL. Zugriff: http://www.macmillanenglish.com/methodology/samples/UncoveringC LIL.pdf. Meriläinen M. 2008. Monenlaiset oppijat englanninkielisessä kielikylpyopetuksessa. Rakennusaineita opetusjärjestelyjen tueksi. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Meyer C. 2003. Bedeutung, Wahrnehmung und Bewertung des bilingualen Geographieunterrichts. Studien zum zweisprachigen Erdkundeunterricht (Englisch) in Rheinland-Pfalz. Dissertation. Trier: Universität Trier. Zugriff: http://ub-dok.uni-trier.de/diss/diss45/20021118/20021118.pdf. Meyer O. 2010. Towards quality-CLIL: successful planning and teaching strategies. Puls 33: 11-29. Nieminen K. 2006. Aspects of Learning Foreign Languages and Learning WITH Foreign Languages: Language Immersion and CLIL. Development Project Report. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Zugriff: http://publications.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/20417/TMP.objre s.212.pdf?sequence=1. Nikula T. / C. Dalton-Puffer / A. Llinares 2013. CLIL classroom discourse. Research from Europe. Journal of Immersion and ContentBased Language Education 1/1: 70-100. Nikula T. 2007. Speaking English in Finnish content-based classrooms. World Englishes 26/2: 206-223. Pehkonen M. 2008. Teachers` Evaluative Turns in Finnish CLIL Classrooms. Pro Gradu Thesis, Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. Zugriff: https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/.../URN_NBN_fi_jyu200804011310.pdf. Perez-Vidal C. 2007. The need for focus on form (FoF) in Content and Language Integrated approaches: an exploratory study. Volumen Monografico: 39-54.

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Sahlberg P. 2012. A model lesson: Finland shows us what equal opportunity looks like. American Educator 36/2: 20-27, 40. —. 2007. Education policies for raising student learning: the Finnish approach. Journal of Education Policy 22/2: 147-171. Sarjala J. / E. Häkli (Hgg.) 2008. Jenseits von PISA: Finnlands Schulsystem und seine neuesten Entwicklungen. Berlin: BWV. Sarter H. 2013. Mehrsprachigkeit und Schule. Eine Einführung. Darmstadt: WBG. Schönfeldt C. 2005. Die Rolle der Visualisierung im bilingualen deutschenglischen Erdkundeunterricht. Dissertation. Braunschweig: TU Carola-Wilhelmina. Zugriff: http://rzbl04.biblio.etc.tubs.de:8080/docportal/servlets/MCRFileNodeS ervlet/DocPortal_derivate_00000005/Document.pdf . Schroeder J. 2010. Lernen von Finnland? Im Ernst? Probleme der Herstellung von Bildungsgerechtigkeiten im Schulsystem. In N. Wenning / M. Spetsmann-Kunkel / S. Winnering (Hgg.), Strategien der Ausgrenzung: Exkludierende Effekte staatlicher Politik und alltäglicher Praktiken in Bildung und Gesellschaft. Münster: Waxmann: 171-183. Smit U. 2013. Learning affordances in integrating content and English as a Lingua Franca (ÌCELF): on an implicit approach to English medium teaching. Journal of Academic Writing 3/1: 15-29. Snow M. A. / M. Met / F. Genesee 1989. A conceptual framework for the integration of language and content in second/foreign language instruction. TESOL Quarterly 23/2: 201-217. Sudhoff J. 2011. Content and Language Integrated Learning / Bilingualer Unterricht – Verborgene Potentiale für DaZ-Konzepte. Essen: Universität Duisburg Essen. Zugriff: http://www.uni-due.de/ imperia/md/content/prodaz/clil_sudhoff20110324.pdf . Tardieu C. / Doltisky M. 2012. Integrating the task-based approach to CLIL teaching. In J. de Dios / A. Martinez Agudo (Hgg.), Teaching and Learning English through Bilingual Education. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 3-35. Ting T.Y. L.et al. 2007. A Collective End-of-Symposium Reflection: The State of the Art of CLIL and Future Prospects. Collective Reflection of the AILA CLIL-ReN Symposium, Sept. 20-22. Zugriff: http://www.ichm.org/clil/pdfs/summary_symposium07.pdf. Thürmann E. 2000. Eine eigenständige Methodik für den bilingualen Sachfachunterricht? In G. Bach / S. Niemeier (Hgg.), Bilingualer Unterricht: Grundlagen, Methoden, Praxis, Perspektiven. Frankfurt/M: Lang: 75-93.

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Van de Graen P. et al. 2007. Why and how CLIL works. An outline for a CLIL theory. Vienna English Working Papers 16/3: 70-78. Weißbuch 1995. Weißbuch zur allgemeinen und beruflichen Bildung: Lehren und Lernen, auf dem Weg zur kognitiven Gesellschaft. Zugriff: http://ec.europa.eu/education/languages/pdf/doc409_de.pdf. Wedel H. 2010. Darstellendes Spiel auf Englisch als Perspektive für den bilingualen Sachfachunterricht. Dissertation. Berlin: Humbolt-Universität. Zugriff: http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/dissertationen/wedel-heike-2010-0115/PDF/wedel.pdf. Wewer T. 2013. English language assessment in bilingual CLIL instruction at the primary level in Finland: Search for updated and valid assessment methods. Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 18/2: 76-87. Wolff D. 2012. The European framework for CLIL teacher education. Synergies Italie 8: 105-116. —. 2007. Einige didaktisch-methodische Prinzipien von CLIL. GoetheInstitut. Zugriff: http://www.goethe.de/ges/spa/dos/ifs/met/de2747826.htm. Zydatiß W. 2007. Deutsch-Englische Züge in Berlin (DEZIBEL): Eine Evaluation des Sachfachunterrichts an Gymnasien. Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang.

CHAPTER NINETEEN CEFR, GMER OR OSCE? INVESTIGATIONS INTO MEDICAL CLIL WITHIN A SELF-ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORK ANNA LOIACONO WITH CRISTINA ARIZZI, DEIRDRE KANTZ, ROSALBA RIZZO AND MARYELLEN TOFFLE

Part I: Introduction1 AICLU and CERCLES have a long tradition in the publication of reports into the application of EU frameworks for language studies (Taylor Torsello / Catricalà / Morley 2002; Taylor Torsello / Gotti 2005; Mansfield / Taylor 2007). However, most of this tradition relates to EU initiatives such as CEFR, ELP, mobility schemes discussed and promoted in many AICLU conferences and seminars (http://www.aiclu.it/convegni_ seminari.html). Indeed, in a wider context, CLIL too is often viewed with reference to European cultural and legislative frameworks (Marsh et al. 2012). Such frameworks can amply claim to ‘cover’ the learning of English in many disciplinary areas. But this is not the case with medicine. Biomedical students both in Italy and elsewhere have to take into account 1

Parts I, VI and VII were written by Anna Loiacono, Part II by Cristina Arizzi, Part III by Rosalba Rizzo, Part IV by Deirdre Kantz and Part V by Maryellen Toffle. Anna Loiacono is Associate Professor in English Language and Translation in the University of Bari and University of Foggia. Deirdre Kantz is a teaching assistant (collaboratore ed esperto linguistico) in the biomedical field at the University of Pavia while Cristina Arizzi, Rosalba Rizzo and Maryellen Toffle are researchers in English Language and Translation in the Department of Juridical Sciences and History of Institutions, University of Messina, who, as the chapter explains, have held lecturing contracts in the degree courses mentioned in the chapter.

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international (as opposed to European) cultural, interactional and legislative frameworks if they are to survive in the contemporary biomedical world. Trainee doctors, for example, need to be aware of standards in the medical field that de facto impose mastery of specialist skills in English such as the IIME’s GMER (Global Minimum Educational Requirements) as well as specific certifications such as the three-step USMLE (United States Medical Licensing Examination) (http://www. usmle.org/) or those promoted in the UK by the General Medical Council (http://www.gmc-uk.org/) and the Royal College of General Practitioners (http://www.rcgp.org.uk/). It is often convenient for teachers of Medical English to duck the issue of international training frameworks and say that teachers of English are in any case exempt from all this as the problem should be dealt with by teachers of biomedical subjects. But this is not true either. The GMER principles focus heavily on the communication skills of the global doctor who interacts with fellow global doctors in English, which is why this chapter reports experiments, surveys and investigations that characterise what training to become a global doctor capable of interacting in English really means. The equally wishful-thinking assumption that international training frameworks are only for a minority of postgraduate students emigrating, say, to the United States after many years of basic training in their home countries is also a further myth ‘blown’ by the GMER principles. How convenient it would be to assume that teachers of English can be ‘let off the hook’ as regards international training frameworks because their teaching is essentially confined to first-year undergraduates, still wet behind the ears and with no prospect of going abroad in a professional capacity for many years. In actual fact, medical training does not work in this way as the various Parts into which this chapter is divided testify to, from a variety of standpoints. They all explain why the GMER principles are an integral part of today’s medical undergraduate syllabus and why they operate (or rather should operate) from day one. Similarly, it is all very well to say that, in any case, all testing formats involved lead back to written and oral forms of assessment of an individual student’s medical knowledge and to argue that, consequently, all that is needed today is a slight tweaking of traditional oral and written formative and summative testing procedures found for example in international exams such as IELTS, Cambridge Assessment, TOEFL and so on. But this is yet another myth. From the United States comes a form of certification known as the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (hereafter OSCE) which is an action/event-driven-type of examination

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widely used in healthcare and concerned with measuring a student’s capacity to execute procedures accurately and in a timely fashion, demonstrating mastery of vocational skills often executed in stressful interactional circumstances. That is, OSCE-type tests and scenarios relate to interactions in medical teams and include real patients, or human or robotic simulated ones, as obligatory elements. One well-known example of the OSCE test is the American Heart Association’s Megacode (Loiacono 2012c: 90-96 [3.2. Old and new training genres: Mega-codes and Patient Simulations]) which, like all OSCE tests, is based on the notion of individual steps (called stations) which require biomedical students to orchestrate (inter)action with a patient and other team members in English. Like a conductor, they have to ensure the right notes are played at the right time and in the right order. The notes in question include appropriate manoeuvres in relation to the patient’s body, correct hand movements, correct manipulation and ‘readings’ of instruments, and much more, such as interaction in English. This type of test, amply described in the Foggia AICLU Medical CLIL Workshop,2 is gaining increasing ground in the medical syllabus. Despite their differences, CEFR, GMER and OSCE frameworks do share common ground. For example, in their different ways, they are concerned with performance-related criteria such as those associated with can-do statements. But what limitations do these frameworks have (Weir 2005)? Can they co-exist? Can they all be part of a Medical CLIL approach? Can they all be part of training that has to face up to biomedical interaction in English in multicultural societies? Here, too, it would be convenient to duck the issue and claim that Italy and perhaps other countries in Europe are not multicultural societies and that, consequently, there is no need to address multilingual and multicultural issues in a medical degree. Twenty years ago in Italy, it might have been possible to hide behind this excuse. But this is no longer the case. The various Parts of the chapter report the need to consider and attempt to reconcile the various cultural, interactional and legislative frameworks in medical education much more proactively than has perhaps been the case in the past. One way of doing this is to consider self-assessment in relation to the CEFR, GMER and OSCE frameworks, and this is what has 2

The Workshop on Medical CLIL in the VIII Convegno AICLU was co-ordinated by Anna Loiacono and brought together various CLIL experiences in biomedical education that included specialist degrees for future doctors and dentists as well as three-year first degrees for nurses, biotechnologists, laboratory technicians and future healthcare workers covering a wide range of specialisations, some of them described in the chapter.

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been undertaken. A further undertaking has been to relate self-assessment to video-based courses in Medical CLIL with detailed reporting of students’ engagement with, and awareness of, Medical CLIL. This has been an ambitious task: in order to address these issues, a series of interlinked and co-ordinated investigations into Medical CLIL with students attending biomedical degrees were conducted in widely-varying geographical and sociocultural contexts. This has proved to be essential as regards consolidating the previous findings of some of the contributors to this chapter (Arizzi 2012: 189-192; Kantz 2012; Loiacono 2012). The new findings are given in the case studies reported in Parts II-VI. The final Part of the chapter, Part VII, draws conclusions about the need for further research into what has perhaps been all too conveniently swept under the carpet in too many courses in Medical English.

Part II : Balancing between language and content: a case study in film-based approaches to Medical CLIL This section deals with how well specialised videos work in the biomedical area in relation to students enrolled in a degree course in biotechnologies taught in Italian. Strictly speaking, biotechnologists are not “medical” students. They do, however, need to be especially aware of medical cultures and systems in the English-speaking world as they are training to become applied biologists, whose inspiration depends on a deep understanding of the application of biotechnologies to specific social problems, many of them arising in the healthcare sector. As such, they are emblematically students who need to entertain the wider cultural, legislative and interactional frameworks sketched out above. Though biotechnologies are applied to fields with no direct application to medicine, such as biofuels or OGM foods, biotechnologists provide strong support for many medical disciplines such as genomics, recombinant gene technologies, applied immunology, development of pharmaceutical therapies and diagnostic tests.3 Accordingly, this section presents a CLIL project for communication in English concerned with creating the scaffolding for future developments, 3

The European Commission’s description, within Horizon 2020, of biotechnologies and bioeconomies as “multi-disciplinary, knowledge and capital-intensive” (http://ec.europa.eu/research/bioeconomy/h2020/biotechnology_en.htm) is most interesting to read as are the various CLIL experiences, mostly at school rather than university level in the field of biotechnology; see for example CLIL 20092010 Biotechnology in English (http://www.istruzionevenezia.it/public/wpustve/ ?page_id=1573).

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not just as regards undergraduate students’ individual careers but reaching beyond this to a point in time when English and Italian will jointly be considered, in this, and other degree courses, as the ‘language of instruction’, within a multilingual and multicultural outlook. As strong applicative skills within an extensive interdisciplinary framework of cultural diversity are essential for these students, the project took the 4Cs developed by Coyle and others (Coyle 2006; Coyle et al. 2010), namely Cognition, Content, Culture and Communication, as its starting point. The project thus had multiple interconnected goals: contentwise, it was organised around biomedical videos in English; communicationwise, it was designed to improve the students’ oral discourse skills, listening in particular; cognitively, it attempted to arouse awareness and reflection on textuality and textual complexity, in particular as regards the integration of linguistic and visual resources; culturally, it was designed to present biomedical problems in relation to different societies around the world each with different stages of socio-medical sophistication, in a perspective that would promote students’ understanding of how the advanced skills in bio-technologies in Western societies can and need to be adapted to meet the requirements of less privileged societies – provided, of course, that the students’ skills in English are up to scratch. Among the many affordances that a CLIL approach offers, a videobased course with specialised medical content would, it was felt, make it possible to focus on viewing-related activities, such as filling in gapped texts and, better still, to complete partially filled-in tables, providing students with good opportunities to improve their listening and cognitive skills. That is, in this approach, the visual component is considered as representing a significant benefit, as it offers a framework for overall understanding as well as a stimulus for further activity (Geddes / Sturtridge 1982; MacWilliam 1986; McGovern 1983). In this sense, a video encourages students to spot and describe the different phases into which a video is typically organised, both from a medical and textual standpoint. In general, it encourages students to reflect on the fact that a video can function as a springboard for commenting on what is not heard but merely seen (Allan 1985; Altman 1988; Canning-Wilson 2000; Cooper / Lavery / Rinvolucri 1997; Sherman 2003). Identifying the relationship between the organisation of texts and specific socio-medical contexts facilitates discussion of the various types of contexts involved (co-texts, context of situation, context of culture and so on; cf. Halliday 1978; Tuffs / Tudor 1990; Sinclair 1991). As demonstrated below, videos can also prompt reflection and further research by the students themselves on the biomedical content presented in a video, encouraging, in the process, the

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consolidation and integration of abilities and competences such as reading, planning and team-based project work.4 The target student group was made up of 25 students attending the first year of the degree course in Biotechnologies at the University of Messina, Sicily. As first-year students, their competence in the biomedical field was poor, but their knowledge of English was surprisingly good, with some students possessing B2 listening skills. The target exit level was B2.5 in listening skills (C1 for the strongest students). In keeping with the CLILoriented goals of the project outlined above, a more specific goal was to fill a gap left in Italian university syllabuses in the medical sector by providing students with a strong cultural awareness of different healthcare systems. Four videos were selected and presented, each of them dealing with different features of healthcare, such as the roles and systems operating in hospitals and biomedical research into the management of the human body. Each video provided students with the opportunity to investigate biomedical issues and discuss them. The videos prompted follow-up studies which were carried out by the students, both individually and in groups, adopting a co-operative learning approach. The focal point of the students’ work was to use English to unearth and organise biomedical information into presentations for formative and summative assessment.

ForWard: video and follow-up The first video presented to the group was ForWard which foregrounds interactional skills in medical English in an Italian hospital context, showing doctors facing emergency situations, and reproducing a typical day in an Emergency Department through the eyes of a trainee doctor, the onlooker in Figure 1; the latter relates to a frame at the point in the video

4

Many websites make the link between video and CLIL, including Keith Kelly’s Using Video in the CLIL Classroom (http://www.onestopenglish.com/clil/methodology/teaching-tips/using-video-inthe-clil-classroom/500987.article) that indicates the value of student-led subtitling in textual awareness which, as reported in this chapter, is actively pursued by the research group as it helps embed awareness of texts and their functions within the broader framework of sociosemiotic theory (Halliday 1978). Equally, like many other publications, this website points out the value of comparing written and oral discourse versions of texts and, in particular, using written transcripts to support video work. This practice was adopted in this part of the project. The full written transcript of ForWard is printed as Appendix III in Loiacono (2013a: 216-231).

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where the patient’s sudden deterioration requires consultation, cooperation, and implementation of a life-saving protocol.

Figure 1. A key moment in the ForWard video

Produced by Lo Presti and Loiacono (2013a) with a view to reproducing realistic situations in a context which Italian students can recognise as their own (Loiacono 2012c), ForWard, as the supporting subtitles illustrated in Figure 1 show, is a scripted dialogue which adopts a typical initial situation-complication-solution event-oriented narrative with which first-year students can easily identify. It presents a male patient with a yellow code emergency condition, requiring cardiopulmonary resuscitation, whose clinical condition – note the influence of the OSCE approach – suddenly deteriorates following acute myocardial infarction that requires immediate angioplasty. The pun in the title, ForWard, obviously points to the concern with clinical procedures and terminology as experienced in hospitals. But the video is much more than that, as it ultimately, and most importantly, uses a clinical simulation as a way to approach biomedical education.

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The visual component, structured dialogues and story-like structure make it easy to elicit student feedback and encourage class debates. For instance, freezing the video at the frame shown in Fig. 2-1 will start a discussion about roles in hospitals and the application of medical protocols. The written-plus-oral discourse option, made possible by subtitling in English in step with the soundtrack, also in English, was appreciated by the students who needed to track what was being discussed, above all when new (for them) medical terminology was being introduced and when the dialogue was perceived as fast and frenzied, especially in the phases where the going gets tough, such as when the patient’s condition suddenly deteriorates. Characterised by a rapid turn-taking structure and imperative speaker selections by the individual members of the team, this is a good introduction to understanding the complex interaction that teamwork involves. Thankfully, as Figure 2 shows, in support of understanding fast-action teamwork, the subtitling provides indications that are not just about the script’s content (what is said) but also about participant relationships (who is speaking to which member(s) of the team) indicated by the formula X>Y; X>Z). As Figure 2 also shows, this principle is extended beyond human addressees to the selection of, and focus on, medical equipment, a matter which transcends the immediate medical context as it is of considerable interest to students in biotechnology whose cultural and educational accomplishments need to include man-machine interactions and the ways in which this interaction will, in practice, work … or, perhaps, even fail. Further illustrations of these principles are given in Figures 3a and 3b which show that the principle of selection-through-subtitling extends to the relation between equipment, body parts and procedures; in the first case, this is apparent in an immediate and obvious way; it is less so in the second case, where the more disjunctive relationship stimulated considerable classroom reflection and debate. Various follow-up activities were indeed carried out after watching the video, in class and in assignments including, for example, explanations of why gaze, in contrast to many face-to-face interactions in daily life, cannot be relied on in many medical contexts as a way of selecting the next speaker. It may well be that a surgeon will often be examining a patient as shown in 3a and will choose to address the team generically rather than specific members. Reflection on the differences between medical and nonmedical discourse contexts, in line with the GMER principles discussed later in this chapter (see in particular Parts IV and VI), was just one of the reasons for beginning the course with this video. Intriguingly, students produced PPT presentations relating to man-machine issues tackled in the

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video relating, in particular, to ECGs and pulse oximeters. From a less medical and more linguistic perspective, they explored the meaning of the many abbreviations introduced in the video, analysing the distinction between initialisms and acronyms and thus reflecting on word formation and language flexibility. On the more cultural side, the social and professional roles in the hospital were discussed, inducing recognition of, and reflection on, the social nature of language and the different roles every person has to act out with reference to the changing contexts of teamwork.

Figure 2. Addressee-generic/specific information provided by subtitling

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Figures 3a (above) and 3b (below): relating body parts and procedures to equipment through subtitling to body parts

A blood test without bleeding: video and follow-up The other videos used during the course were presented directly from the TED.com archive (http://www.ted.com/talks) concerned with “ideas

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worth spreading”, an online collection of more than 1500 talks many of which are suitable for Biotechnology students though, obviously, unlike ForWard, not designed expressly for Medical CLIL. The talks are often no more than 10 minutes long, so they can be easily perceived and understood as a single text at a macro level, though they are equally analysable in their parts at a micro level. As they are designed to inform and entertain a wideranging viewership, they are not too technical, and constitute an asset when teaching first-year students. The online archive offers transcripts that are also used to generate subtitles in many languages and the videos can either be downloaded or watched as streaming videos. Three videos from the TED archive were selected for the course, namely: 1) A blood test without bleeding, 2) The wonder of a living cell, and 3) Growing new organs. The interpretation of the first of these illustrates the main findings of how the video talks genre contributed to the university course in question. Concerned with designing a portable and user-friendly device that is able to measure haemoglobin in the blood without using a needle or producing medical waste, the video provided the opportunity to explore different varieties of English. As Figure 4 shows, text and genre analysis of this and the other TED videos selected prompted students’ reflection on linguistic and non-linguistic modes of communication, starting from the use of space on the stage where the talk was delivered as a way of structuring interaction with the public and contributing, in particular, to the forcefulness of the message. The speaker made use of several devices to highlight important passages in the talk, such as photos, maps, diagrams and captions, which gave the opportunity to consider how the speaker’s message can be conveyed through overlapping semiotic resources, both linguistic and visual, which integrate to create meaning conjunctively, i.e. by using resources that work together harmoniously (Baldry 2000: 65-80). The first point of discussion, immediately raised by a video dealing with diagnosing anaemia in remote regions of India was the Indian variety of English with its characteristic intonation and pronunciation, which underscores the prominently cultural approach to discourse in this course. Indeed, this video successfully allowed cultural issues to be explored, dealing, as it does, with an unfamiliar cultural and healthcare system based on the so-called ASHA workers, village health workers, who are at the very core of public healthcare, rather than doctors. Cultural contrasts between Italian and Indian hospital systems were discussed in class debates (cf. Loiacono 2012c: 41-49).

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Figure 4. Visual semiotic resources in A blood test without bleeding

Multicultural medical competence: comparing videos After watching all the videos, students carried out comparative activities as a way of cementing and integrating their competence in relation to the 4Cs described above. An interesting example was the discussion on the contexts involved, both context of situation and context of culture of the two videos mentioned above (Halliday 1985; Halliday / Matthiessen 2004; Baldry / Thibault 2006: 2; Firth 1957). In ForWard the students found many similarities with the places where they live and study

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(hospitals, roads, ambulances), while A blood test without bleeding showed something completely different, namely environments that are poles apart textually, geographically and culturally from those which students are accustomed to. The visual element was thus fundamental in (re)assuring the students of the validity of the TED Talks (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Context of culture: Italy (left) and India (right) compared

The overall reaction to the four videos provided clues as regards students’ expectations and needs as well as cues for the expansion of their interest in cultural diversity. They found ForWard – a video produced specifically with undergraduates in biomedical sciences in mind – more realistic but more complex than the TED videos which, even though they are real talks, were considered interesting and descriptive though not providing opportunities for personal involvement. As regards content, the biotechnology students were most interested in the Growing new organs video, which presented research on growing human cells outside the body in large quantities, in experiments designed to “bridge” rather than replace injured organs. The contrast between the broad reach of ForWard, with its wealth of potential pathways and the monothematic TED videos provided a much-needed balance, as well as much food for thought about how to integrate different medical video genres into Medical CLIL courses so as to tackle sociolinguistic and sociocultural aspects of medical discourse in a systematic way. Certainly, a first step towards such an approach was achieved through reflection on the social functions of discourse in English, in particular by highlighting the type of exchanges occurring in the videos and the way they encode the relationships between healthcare professionals in a variety of specific clinical contexts ranging from A&E casualty hospitalisation, ward-based therapy and operating-theatre surgery. The interpersonal metafunction (Halliday / Matthiessen 2004: Chapter 4: Clause as Exchange) is prominent in ForWard, which is characterised by a large number of direct exchanges, many of them giving orders. There are few

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interrogative clauses but they do occur such as when the trainee doctor asks for information or confirmation. Instead, the TED Talks, though projecting messages about the hic et nunc, are mainly based on reconstructions of specific experiences and experiments; aside from a few rhetorical questions, they foreground declarative statements that contribute to the dialogue-oriented monologues given by a speaker who is an onstage self-presenter; as such, while addressing a global Internet audience, s/he is also interacting with a reactive studio audience.5 The start they had made to thinking about, and sometimes even questioning, the validity and effectiveness of communication strategies in English was a significant achievement for the students. However small this step may have been in the context of the students’ future requirements, the project points to the added value that integrating texts from various origins and with different styles will provide. Diversity in text types, even when relating to a single sphere, helps build students’ awareness of textual complexity and provides a rich input inspiring personal and collective output. Interpretations of CLIL vary both in terms of theory and practice (Dalton-Puffer 2007; Mehisto / Marsh / Frigols 2008; Mehisto 2012; Marenzi / Kupetz 2012). However, the 4Cs, cognition, content, communication and culture, were constant guidelines throughout the course and were the basis for effective interaction in biomedical areas that were assisted by the students’ well-defined vocational goals (Coyle 2006). Thus, while at the end of the 32-hour course all the students were able to discuss some biomedical issues in English, the most remarkable and satisfying result was that English was perceived as a way of learning about biomedical 5

For an entertaining and enlightening ‘self-critique’ of TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) as a powerful communication and information-sharing tool, see the article by Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, entitled: TED isn’t a recipe for ‘civilisational disaster’. It’s a misconception that TED Talks oversimplify complex subjects. As its curator, I’m committed to the principle that knowledge should be shared (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/08/ted-not-civilisationaldisaster-but-wikipedia). Specialists in interactional skills will be able to judge the contribution or otherwise that TED Talks make to providing models for non-native biomedical trainees in particular in the under-researched field of personality development that undergraduate and postgraduate students have reported in the various investigations and experiments mentioned in this chapter. The numbering of the principles is not part of the original GMER classification, however; the GMER principles are reproduced for ease of reference with the numbering used in Appendix VI; Standards and ‘can do’ statements in medical education in Loiacono (2013a: 250-255).

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concepts and, above all, learning about how to acquire this learning. When meeting students’ needs, expectations and interests, the course boosted skills in English in general and built up the specific ability to discuss biomedical issues in English. On a wider scale, a start was made concerning students’ capacity for reflection on textuality and awareness of what is required for effective communication of original ideas.

Part III: Self-assessment checklists in Medical CLIL This section reports the first preliminary steps in the creation of personal self-assessment checklists for students enrolled in biomedical degrees. The steps towards creating such checklists are based on in-class discussions with first-year students attending a degree course in the field of occupational medicine, specifically the three-year first degree course to become a graduate in workplace safety and environmental protection (TPALL: Tecnico per la Prevenzione Ambientale sui Luoghi di Lavoro). Their training in interactional skills in their mother tongue (Italian) and in English relates to their future work as healthcare professionals who carry out preventive, evaluative and monitoring procedures in environmental health and safety, including in particular food and drink hygiene. In their careers, these graduates will investigate, identify, and report irregularities, evaluating the need to carry out inquiries and investigations into accidents and occupational diseases. They will check that working environments meet the required safety standards and ascertain the safety of various products, for example, cosmetics. They will also take part in court investigations into offences against the environment and workplace health and safety conditions and report any irregularities that fall within their remit. The checklist under construction has to do with awareness raising. Specifically, it is designed to provide a much-needed integration for – and in part correction to – students’ beliefs about the CEFR system, reorienting them towards GMER and OCSE goals. Except in rare cases, students enrolling in this degree in Italian universities are familiar with CEFR and its A1-C2 scale. Indeed, many of them possess an international CEFR-based certificate attesting their level of competence on this scale. They are, on the contrary, generally unaware that their degree course requires a knowledge and use of English that goes beyond the basic lexico-grammatical framework acquired during their school years and demands a focus on specialised meaning-making practices and highlycontextualised vocational skills. This entails the need to take a further step which often comes as a cultural shock for many students who have a hard

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time adjusting to a new set of expectations, having assumed, more or less, that what they already knew would suffice with, perhaps, some “touchups” in lexis whereas, as a matter of fact, getting to grips with biomedical texts requires much more than this. The process of adjusting to the requirements of discourse in English in such texts presupposes guidance and a set of support tools that include self-assessment checklists that allow students to monitor their progress for themselves. This section thus looks at the development of such checklists whose primary purpose is to spell out to students what is required and to help them face up to the reality that a good score on the CEFR scale as attested by an international certificate (e.g. Trinity and Cambridge Assessment exams) is only the starting point for the next step in the development of their interactional skills in English. However, given the students’ familiarity with the CEFR framework, it seemed appropriate to base the checklist on an adaptation of CEFR can-do statements that meets the specific needs of students and teachers in the biomedical area. LEVELS

Listening/Speaking

Reading

B2

CAN take and pass on most messages that are likely to require attention during a normal working day.

CAN understand most CAN deal with all correspondence, routine requests for reports and factual goods or services. product literature he/she is likely to come across.

CAN offer advice to clients within own job area on simple matters.

CAN understand the general meaning of non-routine letters and theoretical articles within own work area

Level 3

B1 Level 2

Writing

CAN make reasonably accurate notes at a meeting or seminar where the subject matter is familiar and predictable.

Table 1. Examples of can-do statements in the ALTE Work Typical Abilities Table Table 1 reproduces a small part of the ALTE Work Typical Abilities Table (http://events.alte.org/cando/work.php) which formed the basis for the author’s first can-do statement table and which relates to previous work undertaken for political science students (Rizzo 2009: 74), a part of which is shown in Table 2. Experience gained with political science students shows that degree-course specific tables are prized by students. Specifically, Table 2 reworks the ALTE can-do statements in terms of

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integrated skills, integrated, that is, in the sense that the specific tasks referred to combine, for example, reading in English with discussions. The table works as a checklist in the following way: the overall tasks are related to specific exercises; after the students have done one or more of the exercises indicated (but naturally omitted here due to their length), they are invited to carry out self-assessment; as well as improving the accuracy of the self-observation, the link between the general description and exercises further validates the table’s checklist function in the students’ eyes. Some of the can-do statements incorporate numerical ratings, i.e. a quantification of the amount of knowledge – 25%/50% – they understand, an approach which is in keeping with the goal of CLIL courses to ensure new knowledge is imparted through the medium of a foreign language. INDEPENDENT USER B1: I have little difficulty in reading the texts in Exercises 2, 3 and 17 though some words are not clear to me. I have some difficulty in providing a summary of the content. Reading texts & talking B2: I have no difficulty in understanding the texts in about them Exercises 2, 3 and 17 and use Internet to find the Exercises 2, 3 & 17 answers needed when analysing these texts. I have no difficulty in talking to others or in comparing my analysis with theirs. B1: I have little difficulty in taking lecture notes or LECTURE NOTES Writing & listening: filling in forms and tables, for example, using my laptop. note-taking, 25% of what I hear will get written. I have no difficulty restructuring & when talking to others or in comparing my analysis with completing partly theirs. written texts B2: I have no difficulty in taking notes and I can Exercises 1 & 17 transform them into a table or a coherent summary. My write-up will be simple but there will be very few mistakes. I can write down some 50% of the lecture. GETTING ENGLISH- B1: I have little difficulty in completing most of my CV but others will need to revise it for me. I am not entirely LANGUAGE JOBS Writing, reading: independent in this respect. Memos, CVs (Europass) B 2: I have no difficulty in completing most of my CV Exercise 7 without further revision by others. GETTING MY UNDERSTANDING OF TEXTS ACROSS

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PRESENTATION Written & spoken skills: Exam-oriented project work e.g. a PowerPoint mini-lecture Exercise 6, 10 & 13

B1: I have some difficulty with PowerPoint presentations usually limited to a slide–by-slide sequence. I cannot describe what comes later or refer to what went before. B2: I have no difficulty in giving a PowerPoint presentation (e.g. in an exam) without feeling stressed. For example, I can illustrate tables and diagrams with no difficulty and can refer to what went before and what will come after with ease.

Table 2. Examples of the author’s can-do statements for Political Science students The next step was to make a further adaptation of the CEFR levels in relation to the interactional skills for the degree in question. This was based on the official prescribed syllabus. The search engine for Offerta Formativa in the MIUR (Italian Education Ministry website: http://cercauniversita.cineca.it/) provides access to these prescriptions for all degree courses throughout Italy, including the one for the degree course at the University of Messina that leads to the status of Graduate in Healthcare Prevention Techniques. It includes the following requirement: Graduates will have acquired basic and specific communication skills in order to announce dangerous situations to populations and have more advanced skills in the exchange of information and opinions that allows them to interact with other Healthcare Professionals in multidisciplinary groups in order to carry out teamwork. They will be able to communicate ideas and information, solve problems and suggest suitable scientific solutions, both in spoken or written Italian and English, concerning the professional field they will be working in. They will be able to write out reports and prepare presentations by means of ICT devices as well, and will contribute to the training and updating of other personnel.6

6 The original Italian text is: I laureati in Tecniche della prevenzione hanno acquisito abilità comunicative di base e specifiche per la comunicazione del rischio alle popolazioni e capacità più avanzate nello scambio d’informazioni e opinioni che consentono loro di interagire con altri operatori di professioni diverse nell’ambito di gruppi di lavoro multidisciplinari per condurre attività di équipe. Saranno capaci di comunicare idee e informazioni, risolvere problemi e proporre adeguate soluzioni di tipo scientifico sia in forma orale sia scritta, sia in italiano sia in inglese, nell’ambiente professionale in cui opereranno. Saranno in grado di redigere relazioni e presentazioni anche con l’ausilio di mezzi informatici e contribuire alla formazione e all’aggiornamento di altro personale.

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This calls for considerable reflection on the nature of information exchange within a teamwork approach, a matter discussed in various parts of this chapter with particular reference to the following GMER requirement on prevention (see for example Table 3): 42. knowledge of their role and ability to take appropriate action in disease, injury and accident prevention and protecting, maintaining and promoting the health of individuals, families and community

As already mentioned previously, CLIL, and Medical CLIL in particular (Baldry 2012; Loiacono 2012a; Maggi 2012), is an innovation that involves the construction of linguistic and communicative competence while developing and acquiring knowledge and disciplinary skills. A CLIL approach by definition refers to situations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focused aims, namely the learning content and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language (Marsh 2002). However, when integrating CLIL into university studies, an approach based on classroom discourse and peer conversation would certainly appear to be appropriate as regards realising this potential, insofar as it ensures that interpersonal communication skills and foreign language proficiency will become part of a student’s conceptual framework (Dalton-Puffer 2007; Rizzo 2007). As various authors have pointed out, by focusing on reflective practices, CLIL learning environments present, or rather should present, authentic tasks by linking them with real information sources that facilitate problem-solving and knowledge construction (Jonassen 1994; Baldry / Kantz / Maggi 2014; Coccetta 2012; Kantz 2012). When we look at Medical CLIL from this perspective, we can see that there are three general issues: receptive processing (reading and listening to texts), language production (discussion and presentation of texts) and student autonomy that need to be reflected in the type of orienting checklist being developed. Within CLIL, receptive processing not only means reading texts and understanding content, it also includes working with graphs, tables, maps and charts, etc. as mini-genres (Baldry / Thibault 2006; Coccetta 2012) embedded in specific video genres. In this context, there is a need for specific metatextual processing strategies which help learners to process the information contained in these complex texts. So developing receptive processing skills in the CLIL classroom is an issue which entails multimodal processing, i.e. processing that includes language and visual processing on an equal footing (Kantz 2012; Loiacono 2012a; Baldry / Kantz / Maggi 2014). Discourse can be analysed as consisting of two sets of skills. On the one hand, there are the typically

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basic, scientific functions carried out by language where the student has to learn how to identify – classify/define – describe – explain – conclude/argue – evaluate. The other set is much more multimodal and metatextual requiring students to reflect on the organisation of texts as texts, which involves learning how to interpret and write about graphs, diagrams and tables, etc. So an important aspect of Medical CLIL that needs to be encouraged at university is to make learners more aware of their learning and language learning processes; to do this, we need to develop greater student autonomy and to promote study and learning skills so that learners can work independently inside and outside the classroom. The conviction was that the productive experiment in the social sciences in reformulating can-do statements illustrated in Table 2 would be repeated in the healthcare sector. This conviction proved to be correct. Table 3 is a prototype checklist developed as a result of classroom discussions with students inspired, in addition to requirement 42 on prevention, by GMER requirement nos. 22-28 (see Loiacono 2103a: Appendix VI) 22. listen attentively to elicit and synthesise relevant information about all problems and understanding of their content; 23. apply communication skills to facilitate understanding with patients and their families and to enable them to undertake decisions as equal partners; 24. communicate effectively with colleagues, faculty, the community, other sectors and the media; 25. interact with other professionals involved in patient care through effective teamwork; 26. demonstrate basic skills and positive attitudes towards teaching others; 27. demonstrate sensitivity to cultural and personal factors that improve interactions with patients and the community; 28. communicate effectively both orally and in writing

Customising can-do statements to students’ needs as university students encourages self-assessment and self-awareness. Customising means critiquing and updating CEFR principles to the realities of university education in the medical field. In many ways, it is completely out of step to write, or rather rewrite, can-do statements as can’t do statements and perhaps even more heretical to adopt have difficulty statements as is the case in Table 2. Yet this is a consequence of the focus on the heavily contextualised micro-skills that the GMER principles presuppose. That is, whereas CEFR-style statements relate to macro-skills that apply across the board to all EU citizens, GMER principles introduce a higher degree of reflection on personal and professional identity that young

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INDEPENDENT USER

UNDERSTANDING

READING WEB PAGES

READING TABLES AND CHARTS

I have some difficulty in reading though I understand most pages on general environmental protection or specialised texts relating to my degree course. I have considerable difficulty in understanding the attitudinal force of such texts beyond the generic ‘for’ or ‘against’. I have some difficulty in understanding the texts indicated as some words are not immediately clear and I have to think about them or look them up in a dictionary. I have some difficulty in listening to soundtracks of films on

LISTENING TO INTERNET environmental protection; the main points of these are clear to me, FILMS ON in particular where the discourse is slow and supported by written ENVIRONMENTAL text. I often need to listen a second and a third time. PROTECTION

WRITTEN INTERACTION: I have little difficulty in writing in a non-scientific way about

UNDERSTANDING

PRODUCING

WRITING REPORTS

SPOKEN PRODUCTION: SUMMARISING

SPOKEN INTERACTION IN A TEAM CONTEXT

READING WEB PAGES

READING TABLES AND CHARTS LISTENING TO INTERNET FILMS ON ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

environmental protection but others will need to revise for me. I am not entirely independent. I have little difficulty in making a prepared statement in which I explain differences and make comparisons between different experiences and views on environmental protection. I have little difficulty in summarising an environmental protection meeting carried out in English but have considerable difficulty in sharing my thoughts with others especially when I want to express my disagreement with them. The effort is quite a strain. I have no difficulty when reading websites and the articles and reports they contain concerned with contemporary medical problems such as those relating to environmental protection in which the writers adopt particular attitudes or viewpoints. I have no difficulty when reading tables, diagrams or charts provided the information they contain is on a familiar topic; I have no difficulty in deploying various resources to solve problems. I have no difficulty in understanding complex lines of argumentation in films on environmental protection, provided the specific topic is reasonably familiar (e.g. laboratory hygiene). I can understand these films if in standard varieties of English.

WRITTEN INTERACTION: I have difficulty in writing in a scientific way about this genre i.e.

PRODUCING

WRITING REPORTS

SPOKEN PRODUCTION: SUMMARISING

SPOKEN INTERACTION IN A TEAM CONTEXT

including comparisons and cause-effect relations. I have no difficulty in presenting clear, detailed summaries on a wide range of subjects relating to environmental protection. I have no difficulty when it comes to representing different viewpoints on the advantages and disadvantages of various environmental protection options. I have no difficulty in interacting with a degree of fluency and spontaneity allowing regular interaction with native speakers. Similarly, I have no difficulty in taking an active part in discussion in familiar contexts, accounting for, and sustaining my views.

Table 3. Examples of can-do checklist statements for students concerned with Environmental Protection

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people in their twenties need to engage with. In this sense, tinkering with CEFR-inspired can-do statements is more than justified. Considerable effort has thus also been made here to make the traditional distinction between the three user types, Basic User, Independent User and Proficient User, clearer and sharper. Hence, wordings such as “with no difficulty” are typically used for the Independent User category but wordings such as “need no support whatsoever” for the Proficient User category. Instead, the rather vague word “can”, and above all the word “cannot”, have been restricted to the Basic User category. With its contrast between Understanding and Interacting with Other Professionals, the table focuses on the distinction between receptive and productive skills. Table 3 does not go into any detail about how the can-do statements are linked specifically to requirements and specific course materials as this issue is discussed in detail in Part IV. However, it should be pointed out that thanks to the rise in online multimedia resources and hence the possibilities for the study of multimodal texts, a checklist can now make specific reference to texts that integrate semiotic resources as visual, linguistic and spatial resources such as film and digital genres, something that would have been impossible a generation ago (Baldry / Thibault 2006; Long / Evers 2009; Mansfield 2005; Mansfield / Taylor 2009; Morgan 2009; Prior 2009; Rizzo 2009; Scott-Monkhouse / West 2009). The careful linkage between the general and the specific, achieved especially by tailoring CEFR objectives and self-assessment procedures to the needs of university students also entails a shift from teacher-led quality control of students’ learning to students’ own quality control of their learning and the awareness among students that the learning process is based on the study of meaning-making practices rather than on lexicogrammatical structures, a vital shift if CLIL is to work properly.

Observations and next steps New routes for testing skills in English at University have long been sought in Italy as elsewhere. For example, the volume entitled Testing in University Language Centres (Sindoni 2009) questions assumptions about testing, ranging from the introduction of cross-cultural communicative competence assessment (Bilotto 2009) to surveys of teacher attitudes towards academic testing of skills in English (Jimenez / Rizzuti 2009). In this respect, too, the entry test is not the only route that can be pursued when making contact with students for the first time. The important point to note is that entry tests do not, in themselves, induce critical reflection on the use of language in context. As such, communicative approaches to

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language have an important but essentially secondary role to play in university text-based studies of English (Whitley 1993). Unlike functional approaches to grammar, and in particular systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1985), they do not reflect on how language is used as a fundamental resource to build texts. In other words, they do not consider that a text is something more than a set of words, sentences or clauses: to borrow a term from Vygotsky (1978), they do not consider the necessary scaffolding. You cannot consider language without text and vice-versa, even though language and text function on different levels (McCarthy 2001). Checklists of the type described here play an important role in this respect. While some form of placement test might seem appropriate, one of their drawbacks is that there is often, for organisational reasons, no possibility to subdivide students into groups of different linguistic levels, a matter which is theoretically possible within an ESP framework but seems to go against the underlying goals of CLIL. In Italy, and one suspects elsewhere, a CLIL-oriented checklist incorporating specialised can-do statements appropriate to the healthcare sector seems to be more beneficial when encouraging students’ co-construction of video-based CLIL courses, a matter described in Part II above and further explored in Part IV.

Part IV: Film-based experimentation of GMER principles This Part of the chapter deals with research involving experimentation with students enrolled in the degree courses in Medicine and Dentistry in a University in Northern Italy, the University of Pavia. Alongside the degree course in Medicine taught in Italian, the University of Pavia introduced a degree course entirely in English in the 2009-2010 academic year. Personal experience of working and carrying out research in a degree course in Medicine, which is entirely in English but taught by teachers who, like the students, are mostly non-native speakers of English, leads to the conclusion that multilingualism is a significant cultural prerequisite and, in particular, dictates the constant need for students to reflect on different ways of formulating concepts in specialised medical contexts, in Italian, English and other languages. It also connects up with one of the starting points of the current research, which is to explore linkages between GMER principles to students’ self-awareness as future global doctors and, in particular, to self-testing that focuses on this growing professional self-awareness, along the lines of what is discussed in other parts of this chapter. This Part will thus report on the long and as yet unfinished road towards Medical CLIL self-awareness and training in self-testing that

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incorporates reference to films and in particular subtitling and captioning of films. Subtitling is viewed by the research group as a significant multimodal resource that can contribute to Medical CLIL, as Part II above and Part VI below further indicate. Part IV is thus divided into three subsections. The first focuses on gauging reactions to the viewing of medical films in class within a filmbased Medical CLIL syllabus; the second concerns activities that induce reflection on discourse in which students create subtitles and captions for existing films using captions and subtitles as a metatextual resource that encourages the process of reflecting on how medical communication works (Kantz 2014); specifically, this subsection promotes the application of the GMER principles using metatextual resources such as subtitling and captioning to this end. The third subsection, still very much in an experimental phase, takes a further step by focusing on online CLIL testing and above all self-testing which embraces reflection on multimodal discourse in keeping with what is stated in Part II above and Part VI below.

A film-based medical syllabus As is the case with any CLIL-oriented course, the selection of a genre or genres to be explored conditions the relationship between content and language. Since the end of the Second World War, Public Service Announcements (hereafter Psas) and Public Information Films (hereafter Pifs) have accompanied, and often illustrated, changing attitudes towards healthcare in the wake of the rise of national healthcare systems in specific countries. The term Pif is used in the UK and the term Psa is used elsewhere, mainly in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the USA, to refer to the short, hard-hitting and often gruesome government-inspired messages about dangers and threats to society, more often than not on issues affecting a particular nation’s health (Baldry / Kantz 2009; Kantz 2012; Marenzi / Kantz 2013). While genre selection and classroom illustrations of a specific genre represent a good starting point, experience has highlighted the further requirement for students to work with, and on, that genre, participating in the construction of a shared corpus, which is the basis for their further investigations (Baldry 2011: Chap. 3). As is the case in question, groups of students are encouraged in this approach to work together to find examples which they, rather than the teacher, interpret and comment. In other words, the consequence of this approach is that a fundamental change has taken place in the way CLIL is pursued at University. With the construction of a corpus of online films, teachers and

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students become the co-creators of CLIL content, with the students constantly supported by the framework set up by the teacher (Baldry 2011). In medical degrees, the construction of an online corpus using specialised tools (see Section IV.3 below) is a powerful motivational factor, in particular where it has a historical dimension (Baldry 2000), one which leads students and teachers to ponder on changes in social attitudes towards healthcare and changes in the way medical facts are communicated (Loiacono 2012a, 2013b). A first step is the classification of the chosen genre into subcategories (Baldry / Kantz 2009), itself the result of classroom discussions that are inevitably linked to the subjects taught in a medical degree and, in particular, to the specialisations that students will take up in their postgraduate degrees (see Part VI below). Such classifications, as well as relating to categories of knowledge, also reflect the way medical information is communicated to the public by governments, their scientists and, more generally, the medical profession. Over a period of ten or so years, in which the author of this section has implemented this type of syllabus, invaluable classroom discussions in English among students and between students and teachers (two teachers were usually present) have led to general agreements about classifications. A first category that stands out relates to health-scare thematics (Baldry 2005), which can be broadly classified in terms of the following subgenres:1) the drugs-scare subgenre dealing with the harmful consequences of drug-abuse, alcohol and smoking; 2) the do-or-die subgenre involving direct medical warnings and reflecting paternalistic doctor-patient relationships; 3) the sex-scare subgenre which initially dealt with venereal diseases, then with AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, and which in more recent years has addressed sexual abuse by paedophiles; 4) the accidents-as-health-hazards subgenre whether at work, in the home, or on the road, including domestic violence, mobbing, bullying, and more recently, at least in Italy, stalking. A second batch of subgenres relating to what we can call Public Health Awareness includes 5) the solidarity subgenre, mostly concerned with incurable genetic diseases and designed to raise awareness and funds for research, as well as to give support to families, carers, and patients; 6) the mental health subgenre dealing with the stigma associated with mental health disorders (Kantz 2012) is a further significant category, as is 7) the Public Health Systems subgenre which explains public versus private coverage and the overall organization of public healthcare including, in modern times, the rise of electronic medical records where issues of public/private coverage re-emerge (Baldry 2011); two final categories are: 8) the food and eating disorders subgenre with films on childhood and adult obesity

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and 9) the climate change and health subgenre affecting, in particular, very young children and the elderly (Coccetta 2012). As society changes, the boundaries between the Psa/Pif genre and other genres require adjustments and additions to be made to these overall classifications. A good example is the rise of the films relating to electronic medical records (EMRs). These films form a cline: some relate to individuals, others to their families, yet others to entire nations (Baldry 2011) e.g. those relating to Obamacare (https://www.healthcare.gov) in the USA and Canada’s Infoway (https://www.infoway-inforoute.ca/). While some of these EMR films fall into the category of training films, others have the typical hallmarks of Psas/Pifs, essentially a government message to the public about social issues, in this case involving the management of healthcare and healthcare systems in economic and technological terms, in ways that are relevant to GMER Principles 46, 47 and 48 (see Table 4-1). Hence their inclusion in the 7th category. Classifications of this kind are a means to activating process-oriented classroom discussions. Comparing, understanding, interpreting, and negotiating different cultural perspectives, and maintaining a focus on films not so much as products but rather as exponents of sociocultural processes in a constantly changing society is a focal part of this approach to Medical CLIL. Table 4, in fact a self-awareness Table-cum-Task, helps encourage this process-oriented view of Medical CLIL. It is designed to encourage self-management of learning with reference to the GMER goal of training a global doctor. As the Table shows, the GMER requirements are rather abstract in their formulation and need to be fleshed out with reference to concrete examples on a par with illustrative definitions in a dictionary or the can-do statements discussed elsewhere in this chapter. In this way, rather than as passive receptors, students are actively involved in matching GMER principles to each of the subgenres identified and are encouraged to describe why and how these principles are enacted and entextualized. Medical trainees may at times raise an eyebrow at some examples of Pifs (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ films/) such as the UK Pif Rabies Advice warning about rabies in the UK when no case in the human population has been reported for over 100 years. However, we can see that these short films, often only 30 seconds long, punch home the link between medical specialisations and general healthcare issues in specific societies which is, as the GMER principles recall, a very important part of today’s medical education. Particularly evident in this respect is the link to Group V of the GMER principles relating to Public Health, whose introductory statement reads as follows:

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Population Health and Health Systems: Medical graduates should understand their role in protecting and promoting the health of a whole population and be able to take appropriate action. They should understand the principles of health systems organization and their economic and legislative foundations. They should also have a basic understanding of the efficient and effective management of the health care system.

Within the research reported in this chapter, Table 4 represents a crucial step in the process of classroom discussions and corpus construction, as students are called on to relate abstract medical principles to real-life cases expressed in the individual films of each of the subgenres identified above and embedded in Table 4. The Table consists of 5-row blocks. The first row gives the GMER principle, the second the subgenres while the remainder give partially completed suggestions about what to include in the corpus. The third row in each block relates to Psa/Pif examples in the National Archives (NA) and other British (UK)/Irish (IE) sources. The UK’s National Archives site (www.nationalarchives. gov.uk/films/) is a ready-made collection of Public Information Films covering a 60-year period of British history (Baldry / Kantz 2009).7 The fourth row relates to examples from the US, Canada (CA), Australia (AU), New Zealand (NZ); the fifth row relates to examples from European (EU) and International Organizations (IO). To encourage the students, some of the rows in the table have been left incomplete, deliberately so, as they are an invitation to students to take over and build up a corpus using the table as a starting point, a challenge, which, as experience shows, is willingly taken up. Table 4 is thus a set of instructions to students to relate GMER principles to specific Psa/Pif subgenres. Whether the students materially completed this table or not is beside the point. Its function is to promote student-led applications of GMER principles to “real life” through the construction of a Psa/Pif corpus based on online searching.

7

The superscript numbers refer to the classification of the Pifs (Baldry / Kantz 2009: 228) which were made available to the students.

384 GMER Principle Subgenres NA, UK,IE US, CA, AU, NZ EU, IO

GMER Principle Subgenres NA,UK, IE US, CA, AU, NZ

EU, IO GMER Principle

Subgenres NA, UK, IE

US, CA, AU, NZ EU, IO GMER Principle

Chapter Nineteen 41. knowledge of important life-style, genetic, demographic, environmental, social, economic, psychological, and cultural determinants of health and illness of a population as a whole; 7, 3, 5, 6, 1 Your Very Good Health (NA);3 Mental Health Interview (NA);79 Aids Monolith74 Fragile X Syndrome (Animation CDC USA): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =auIwEV1SiBQ; National Institute of Mental Health – Anti-label TV Psa Campaign (USA): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=738ZDj-Xru8 The many paths towards universal health coverage (WHO): http://www.who.int/universal_health_coverage/en/ Personal Stories and the WHO's Mental Health Action Plan (WHO): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv_exaj2ofg&feature=youtube 42. knowledge of their role and ability to take appropriate action in disease, injury and accident prevention and protecting, maintaining and promoting the health of individuals, families and community; 1,3,4,5 HEBS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_e-wd0h9MU MS Society “A hope in hell”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyzpsGVCh4M Every cigarette is doing you damage (Quitnow National Tobacco Campaign – Australia): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkbvd9FvVwU Domestic violence against women in South Asian Community (USA): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STT-r6GmWoc Stop domestic violence against women! (Council of Europe): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqfNekxvtbs 43. knowledge of international health status, of global trends in morbidity and mortality of chronic diseases of social significance, the impact of migration, trade, and environmental factors on health and the role of international health organizations; 7, 8, 9 Modern Guide to Health2; Climate Change – Tomorrow’s Climate – Today’s Challenge85; Food Safety: Safefood Safe and healthy eating on the Island of Ireland: www.safefood.eu Break the Habit (Childhood obesity ad: AU); Stop Childhood Obesity: Hypertension (Georgia, US): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUuu5CODEmg 44. acceptance of the roles and responsibilities of other health and health-related personnel in providing health care to individuals, populations and communities;

Subgenres 2, 7 NA, UK, IE Perfusionist Interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1FoDI26V6w Look Ahead, Explore Your Career: Anesthesia Nurse: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=-scFATr4RDA; Because of Occupational Therapy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud5Fp279g4Y US, CA, AU, NZ EU, IO GMER 45. an understanding of the need for collective responsibility for health promoting Principle interventions which requires partnerships with the population served, and a multidisciplinary approach including the health care professions as well as intersectoral collaboration;

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Subgenres 2, 5, 7 NA, UK, IE US,CA, What is Global Health – Global Health Gateway (Australia): AU,NZ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw4uzQalPBU Timmy Global Health (USA): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4F3zDPv3g1c EU, IO GMER 46. an understanding of the basics of health systems including policies, Principle organisation, financing, cost-containment measures of rising health care costs, and principles of effective management of health care delivery; Subgenres 7 NA, UK, IE US,CA, Telus Health Space: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T16NFVPiVwg AU,NZ EU, IO GMER 47. an understanding of the mechanisms that determine equity in access to health Principle care, effectiveness, and quality of care; Subgenres 7 NA, UK, IE Your Very Good Health (NA)3 US,CA, The pan-Canadian EHR: The Plan: AU,NZ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SYtv5jh4tQ EU, IO GMER 48. use of national, regional and local surveillance data as well as demography Principle and epidemiology in health decisions; Subgenres 7 NA, UK, IE US,CA, Why electronic health records?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo_3qOejQzI AU,NZ EU, IO GMER 49. A willingness to accept leadership when needed and as appropriate in health Principle issues; Subgenres 2 NA, UK, Crashed lives Dr. Gerry Lane: http://www.rsa.ie/RSA/RoadIE Safety/Campaigns/Current-road-safety-campaigns/Crashed-Lives/ US,CA, AU,NZ EU, IO

Table 4. Relating GMER principles to specific Psa/Pif films As suggested above, on the basis of the evidence gathered over a tenyear period, the classroom study of this genre has been very successful, and not just because students have turned out hundreds of examples. As Table 4 suggests, the use of Psas/Pifs is designed to raise students’ GMER awareness: to encourage them to observe, analyse and compare cultural systems and cultural contrasts; to “identify” identities and to tie up intercultural awareness with an exciting medium such as film, all of which leads into the need to look at social identities as part of GMER-oriented

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medical education as the following statement in the IIME website (http://www.iime.org/documents/gmer.htm) underscores: In defining the essential competencies that all physicians must have, an increasing emphasis needs to be placed on professionalism, social sciences, health economics and the management of information and the health care system. This must be done in the context of social and cultural characteristics of the different regions of the world. The exact methods and format for teaching may vary from school to school but the competencies required must be the same. Thus, the concept of ‘essentials’ does not imply a global uniformity of medical curricula and educational processes. Furthermore, the global essential requirements are not a threat to the fundamental principle that medical education has to identify and address the specific needs in social and cultural context [sic] where the physician is educated and will practice.

Linking the Psa/Pif genre to the students’ general experience of society and medicine and hence with other genres such as famous films is really important for them. Four films may be mentioned briefly as examples selected by the students in line with the criteria mentioned above. As Figure 6 shows, the first film from the UK National Archives Smoker of the future is on smoking prevention and dates back to 1982. Since prevention (see Part III) is about promoting people’s future, the film, which draws intertextually on the well-known film Blade Runner, gives a futuristic projection of the evolution of the human body which will adapt evolution-wise to counteract the adverse effects of smoking. As the offscreen narrator gravely reports in the form of a grim joke: The first natural born smoker will have [...] a larger nose to filter out impurities, self-cleaning lungs, a highly developed index and middle finger, smaller ears (because they don’t listen), extra eyelids to protect from irritating smoke and, of course, an in-built resistance to heart disease, lung cancer and thrombosis [...]

With its reference to Blade Runner, the film in question may have been highly successful in its day, but students were well aware that every generation needs to re-invent medical communication adopting new strategies and forms of entextualisation if the message is to be effective.

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Figure. 6. Screenshots from Smoker of the Future

This principle is enacted in the Irish Psa Crashed Lives (http://www.rsa.ie/ RSA/Road-Safety/Campaigns/Current-road-safety-campaigns/Crashed-Lives/) which talks about road accidents from a surgeon’s standpoint underscoring the surgeon’s responsibility as regards leadership vis-à-vis accident prevention. On the basis of Smoker of the future, a group of Italian and Israeli students decided to search online for Pifs and Psas that looked at new techniques of communication on the same theme in the field of prevention. They came up with many examples, including Every cigarette is doing you damage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vkbvd9Fv VwU). This is again on prevention, but while the cultural context is Australian, the style is American in inspiration. It uses a hard-hitting but compelling metaphor: the well-known crime scene investigation genre is adopted in this Psa to show how cancer forms as a consequence of smoking. The viewer, just like a CSI investigator, is led into the smoker’s throat, down into his lungs where s/he sees how a cancer cell is formed and developed. By showing the internal mechanisms of body organs, viewed with reference to striking forms of communication inspired by famous film-makers, viewers are confronted with a realistic image of what could happen to them, inducing fear and a concern for prevention. Another theme investigated by various groups of students related to driving and drug-taking or drinking Psas/Pifs. This again is a source for intercultural comparison and reflection on the role of genre and intertextuality in medical communication with reference to famous films. The HEBS – Split-Screen Pif (Health Education Board for Scotland, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_e-wd0h9MU) is based on the notion of two versions of the same life as presented in Howitt’s Sliding Doors; in this case, the Pif tells the story of a young boy and his decision to avoid drug abuse. It innovatively uses a split-screen technique to show his other self who chooses to take drugs. The film ends with his good-self giving money to his drug-self who is reduced to begging on the streets. In their furtherance of the understanding of the application to themselves, as budding doctors, of GMER Principle 42, concerned with “disease, injury and accident prevention and protecting, maintaining and

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promoting the health of individuals, families and community”, the students sought examples of communication that highlighted flashback and flash forward projection techniques within the tight time constraints of Psas/Pifs. In this vein, one group of students compared an Australian and a Canadian film. The first, a Psa called Marijuana (http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=PvNs1efRsc0), sponsored by the Australian Government, shows five different social contexts, with the same underlying pattern. Each presents a specific social circumstance and a main, usually passive, late teens or early twenties participant who is addicted to marijuana. Strikingly, viewers are catapulted between the various scenes in a sequence of forward and backward projections that foreground the moment when the consequences impact on the participants. All these circumstances which variously present the social, mental and physical effects of smoking marijuana aim to show the different medical consequences and responsibilities through a focus on the individual’s isolation. The theme of responsibility/irresponsibility also characterises the Canadian film that the medical students chose, The Mask (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k133 BL5YOWY), in which the main active participant, a mask on the wall, comes to life and may be interpreted, in keeping with the HEBS film, with the projection onto the mask of part of the marijuana smokers’ personality. Thus, the mask is a metaphorical projection of the smokers’ bad conscience. The passion with which students looked for, commented and discussed Psas/Pifs in relation to GMER principles and, in particular, their predilection with visual forms of communication as expressed in famous films constituted an important scaffolding on which the next step – the use of subtitling and captioning – could be based.

Reflection on language: subtitling and captioning The practice of medicine and management of a health system depends on the effective flow of knowledge and information. Advances in computing and communication technology have resulted in powerful tools for education and for information analysis and management. Therefore, graduates have to understand the capabilities and limitations of information technology and the management of knowledge, and be able to use it for medical problem solving and decision-making. (GMER: Management of Information)

In tune with the above GMER indications on Management of Information, this case study into self-awareness and self-assessment as a budding doctor illustrates the use of subtitling and captioning as a way

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forward in Medical CLIL, and not just as regards integrating medical education with technology (Egbert / Hanson-Smith 1999; Chapelle 2003). Students were, of course, introduced to the use of specially-designed research tools such as MWS ACE and LearnWeb2.08 to actively involve them in the process of materials selection (see for example GMER Principle 50 below). Thus, the first phase of the students’ team project work focused on the search for, and organisation of, Psas/Pifs on specific themes into a small corpus. Besides being an online repository for the students’ corpora (online corpora are, of course, to be considered as a first step in the management of information), LearnWeb2.0 presents a series of functionalities, often used in social networking, that allowed the students to share information by annotating their choices and reflecting on meaning-making resources and English discourse in their group forums (Marenzi et al. 2009). Casting a wider net, a consequence of adopting the GMER framework brings about specific contextualisation as regards context of situation and context of culture (Halliday 1978; Kress 2000) as well as comparisons that can be made between the local and global – for instance the use of Yorkshire dialect by the creators of the 1968 Pif entitled Joe and Petunia (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/films/1964to1979/filmpagecoastguard.htm). This relates to marine safety and the need for the public to call the coastguard. The Yorkshire dialect attributed to Joe and Petunia provides a striking local context for implementing rules that recall GMER Principles 36 “recognize immediate life threatening conditions” and 37 “manage common medical emergencies”. Such striking contexts are food for thought about the need to recontextualise local contexts across time and place and across different cultures and social status. Interestingly, recontextualisations (Baldry / Thibault 2001, 2006) also relate to technology too: the recently revamped Joe and Petunia marine safety Pif now shows Joe using a smartphone instead of running to a red telephone box to make an emergency call to the coastguard (http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=CBc02FPSvXc). In keeping with what is stated in Part III, the following GMER principles were effectively turned into can-do statements during corpus co-creation:

8

MWS is a software tool developed under Anthony Baldry’s guidance as part of the Living Knowledge Project, an international 7th framework project (Baldry 2011). LearnWeb 2.0 is a freely accessible online platform developed by the University of Hannover in the L3S centre for educational software: http://learnweb.l3s.uni-hannover.de/ (Marenzi 2008).

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Chapter Nineteen 50. search, collect, organize and interpret health and biomedical information from different databases and sources; 51. retrieve patient-specific information from a clinical data system; 52. use information and communication technology to assist in diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive measures, and for surveillance and monitoring health status; 53. understand the application and limitations of information technology; 54. maintain records of his/her practice for analysis and improvement.

Many of the examples reported here are the work of dentistry students in the 2011-2012 academic year who, despite their restricted number (22 students), enacted the five principles listed above when carrying out their team project work. True students were not dealing with patients, but by using subtitling and captioning to interact with texts, they implemented the process of formulating GMER principles in terms of can-do statements that they felt were relevant to their explorations of Psas/Pifs. The first step in their work consisted in searching, collecting and organising information (Principle no. 50); this was done using MWS and LearnWeb2.0, besides other commercially available online tools (Principle no. 52); they then applied the information technology to create subtitles and captions (Principle no. 53) facing and overcoming any technical difficulties they met with. The following is an example of one group’s work. The students created a mini-corpus (Baldry 2011) of Psas/Pifs on childhood obesity and used intertitles to carry out their phasal analysis (Baldry / Thibault 2001, 2006), subtitles to describe the experiential metafunction (Halliday / Matthiessen 2004), intralingual subtitles for key information, and finally interlingual subtitles, translating the metatextual language of the videos (keywords, slogans, acronyms and occasionally sentences) into Italian (Principles nos. 51-54).9 All the films tell stories about how obesity is becoming a lifethreatening condition and are clearly aimed at prevention within a Public Health system. One of the films in particular, Break the Habit (http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=82kYQ7j7X2s) is very dramatic; the atmosphere is dark and gloomy with a sense of foreboding. There are two main characters: a mother and her child. There is no spoken dialogue, but the soundtrack with eerie music (typical of the horror genre), focuses on ambient sounds (footsteps, a chair moving, paper crinkling) as the camera follows the movements and actions of the mother. Viewers are held on edge because she seems to be preparing a syringe with heroin to inject into 9

For a more detailed definition and description of the various types of overlays mentioned, see Kantz 2014.

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her little boy’s arm. Then the unexpected: they unwrap a hamburger and start eating. The film concludes with “You wouldn’t inject your children with junk. So why are you feeding it to them?” And then the final punchline gravely states: “Childhood Obesity – Break the Habit”. This can be interpreted as an example of CLIL self-testing as it demonstrates the capacity to reflect on and analyse medical texts in relation to social contexts using basic principles from Hallidayan linguistics as applied to biomedical science (Halliday / Martin 1993; Lemke 2006; Baldry 2011). It demonstrates a capacity to integrate skills, to use information technology and to select relevant examples from a corpus that students collectively created using the prescribed mediacy tools Learnweb2.0 and MWS-ACE (Baldry 2011; Gaggia 2012; Marenzi et al. 2008). This example, like others, was also presented by students as part of their final exam showing dedication in construction and fluency of exposition which was truly multimodal: oral, written, visual and so on. Significantly, the exposition included an explanation of what was analysed, how and why it was so analysed, and a careful description of what was left out and why, in other words demonstrating a high degree of self-evaluation that in many ways made the Commission’s task of formal assessment easier. Most students in the degree courses in question (Medicine and Dentistry) already start out with a high entry standard of English (B2+ or C1), but had not previously encountered a framework that made it possible for them to see how and why they could apply their English language skills to the medical contents and contexts they were now grappling with and to take the further step of making their interpretations of that framework explicit. A further illustration is a Canadian Psa on the origin of the food Canadians eat “Do you know where your food comes from?” (http://www. you tube.com/watch?v=dIsEG2SFOvM). The students’ use of overlays that focus on explaining the meaning-making processes used in this film are of particular interest (Kantz 2014). In describing the codeployment of images, metatextual functions, charts, tables, animations and other resources such as the off-screen narrator’s voiceover that informs Canadians about this situation, the student in question has clearly demonstrated a multimodal awareness of text and a capacity to carry out a commentary on the film that links in with the GMER principle of being able to explain complex medical principles to laypersons and patients, an important feature of global GMER medical education. A final example links up to Loiacono’s intuitions (Part VI) about the significance of exploring issues in Medical CLIL courses, such as forensic sciences (Loiacono 2013a: Chap. Unit 6) long before they are presented to

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students in the formal syyllabus. This is in keepingg with the finding (see Part VI) tthat biomediical studentss become innterested in medical specialisatioons early on in i their mediccal education. The film in question, UV Food Saafety (http://w www.youtube.ccom/watch?v= =G759a-UNO OTE), was chosen by a dentistry student, s but is i actually juust as approp priate for students in Messina gradduating in Heealthcare Prevvention Techn niques. It deals with thhe issue of foood safety and d the transmisssion of germss. Despite the fact thaat the studentt who worked d on this proj oject stated hee got the creeps everyy time he waatches this fillm and has bbecome obsesssed with hygiene, nottice how the sequence s of key k frames haas been transfo ormed by the student into written narrative n in accurate a Engliish through th he use of captions andd subtitles.

Figure 7. Unsseen germs screeenshots from UV U Food Safetyy

The bluee world used when w photogrraphing the kiitchen shown in Figure 7 is a projecction of a miccroscopic worrld. With fluoorescence, one can see things that aare not normaally seen in normal n light ((germs show up pink); this is a recoontextualisatioon of the ultraaviolet light teechnique ofteen used in police TV sseries such ass CSI. The fact fa that theree is a colour scale for

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ultraviolet rays reinforces the message about the significance of visualverbal integrations in medical education. As is typical in the Psa/Pif genre the film is accompanied by a female off-screen narrator voiceover: Every year thousands of people suffer from food poisoning caused by the spread of unseen germs. If you could see these germs spread, you’d clean as you go. Keep your kitchen and your loved ones safe. For more information visit safefood.eu. Safe food, be safe, be healthy, be well.

This voiceover has the typical function of linking a specific context to global contexts, a fundamental GMER principle.

Towards online CLIL testing Even more experimental was the work using mediacy tools on online CLIL testing and self-testing. So far, we have been talking about students in the first year of their medical education. However, increasingly English is taught in later years in medical degree courses, so we need to carry out experiments with, for example, fourth-year medical students who know a lot about medicine and are beginning clinical practice. As their medical knowledge has now increased, they begin to sound like doctors. In the fourth year, students are extremely busy as they start their internship so that logistics and good organisation in performance-related activities becomes increasingly significant. But they still need practice in communicating with each other as doctors and not as students. An experiment was thus carried out with LearnWeb2.0’s online forum facility to this end. Yet again, we see how mediacy support systems help implement GMER recommendations (see the quotation at the start of the previous subsection) by showing the contribution that student-led information management can provide to their medical education and their capacity to communicate in medical English. As Figure 8 shows, the students are discussing what topic they want to research and negotiate the type of shock they want to discuss, demonstrating how significant student selection is. In this way, we can build up a wealth of experiences and multiple solutions which provide a shareable bank of experiences and materials that we in turn can share with others, for example the members of AICLU and research teams developing mediacy systems. The focus is on research that can be critiqued by others scientifically, as the experiments described in this Part of the chapter, and indeed the other Parts, are reproducible and lend themselves to the production of precise research data, in a spirit of research-based teaching and teaching-

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based researrch (Willcoxsson et al. 2011) enhanced bby interlinked d research experimentss in different geographical g areas. a

Awareness of issue selectio on and doctorr-patient comm munication Figure 8. A highlighted inn real-time debaate

Conclusions Reflectioon on interaaction, genres, media typpes and chaannels of communicattion are all-im mportant in medical com mmunication. Psas/Pifs allow these issues to be explored e with reference to a historical tim meline as they embraace a change from the tim me when theey were pressented in cinemas, inncluding mobbile cinemas (Baldry / Kantz 2009)) to TV advertisemeents and now w, in the Inteernet age, to emails, YouT Tube and mobile techhnology com mmunication. University edducation is all a about learning to eengage with different d genres, scientific genres in parrticular. It is also aboutt the question of encouragin ng students too work in team ms. In this respect, thee GMER prinnciples really are an esseential framew work. The meaning-maaking resourcees used, the laanguage – ofteen written to be b spoken – music, imaages, etc. are a reflection off culture and ssociety. In thiis respect, the importannt point for uss is that the seelection of maaterials is partlly carried out by studeents in the buuilding of a co orpus (Baldryy 2011; Baldry y / Kantz

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2009). Students are given guidelines, but they actively contribute to corpus construction. Involving them in this principled selection of materials (i.e. linked to the GMER framework) makes them reflect on the importance of Public Health systems, how they operate within specific cultures, how such systems change, and how and why this implies very strong crosscultural differences discussed in detail in Part V below. One contribution explored by the students in this respect that space has precluded from discussion so far relates to the management of mental health in Public Health systems, an issue which in recent years has come more and more into the limelight together with domestic abuse (see GMER 42 in Table 4-1 for the latter). As students’ teamwork in the construction of Psa/Pif corpora shows, what emerges is a division into age groups (children, teenagers, adults, senior citizens) and types of disease (anorexia, bulimia, the effects of Alzheimer’s, and so on). Though addressed to the general lay public, the films also target very specific niches of the population, depending on their specific aims: parents/children; teenagers/young adults; the elderly; experts in various sectors. That is, what is foregrounded, according to the specific Psa/Pif is typically a series of perspectives: the child’s; the parents’; the health worker’s as well as the obvious perspective of the individual adult sufferer portrayed in Mental Health Interview (see Table 4: GMER 41). Of course, other types of classification can be made, starting from websites that deal with mental health in general as well, of course, as those that deal with specific mental health diseases or conditions (e.g. Alzheimer’s: www.alzheimers.org.uk/multimedia/). As befits a CLIL approach concerned mainly with interpersonal and interdisciplinary relations, we may report that what predominated in the students’ work, suggesting their reception (Holub 1984) and approval of a GMER-oriented syllabus, was a research strategy based on the diversity of perspectives in mental health. Significantly, the students who chose this line of investigation learnt to distinguish the different registers that are used to convey medical and scientific information in different communities (Kantz 2012). Intriguingly, as Table 4 shows, GMER principle 41 lent itself to the analysis of mental health. This is as it should be; issues of mental health are a social “hot potato”, inevitably intersecting, as indicated in Part V below, with issues of cross-cultural competence. Corpora and their use are very important in these lines of investigation. The starting point was the National Archives, a dream come true for teachers: a ready-made corpus of social and cultural issues that can be analysed through a multimodal perspective. The arrival point was for students to build their own corpora and make their own selections as a way

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of reflecting on public health (Baldry / Kantz 2009). The ready-made corpus is, as it were, the scaffolding, which can be pulled away once the foundations have been built. We suggest that this type of syllabus is appropriate for students undertaking their very first steps in their 5-year degree course in dentistry or 6-year degree course in medicine than one concerned exclusively with specialised lexis or lexico-grammatical structures. While specialist knowledge might be useful in the future, the students’ more immediate concern is to acquire and practise general interactional and metainteractional strategies associated with fluent, analytical exposition in English in an increasingly multimodal/multimedia world.

Part V. Intercultural competence in medical discourse in English: a future challenge for Italian Medical Schools This section focuses on the need to go beyond traditional views of communication skills in English by considering the emergent need for training in interaction with patients from other cultures. Before they become experts in sociocultural factors in medicine, budding medical professionals need to be literate in basic cultural studies so they can understand the basics of how cultures influence the patient and themselves. As indicated elsewhere in this chapter, the GMER guidelines contain various references to the global doctor’s intercultural skills: In defining the essential competencies that all physicians must have, an increasing emphasis needs to be placed on professionalism, social sciences, health economics and the management of information and the health care system. This must be done in the context of social and cultural characteristics of the different regions of the world. The exact methods and format for teaching may vary from school to school but the competencies required must be the same. Thus, the concept of ‘essentials’ does not imply a global uniformity of medical curricula and educational processes. Furthermore, the global essential requirements are not a threat to the fundamental principle that medical education has to identify and address the specific needs in social and cultural contexts where the physician is educated and will practice. Finally in pursuing the ‘global minimum essential requirements’, medical schools will adopt their own particular curriculum design, but in doing so, they must ensure that their graduates possess the core competencies envisioned in the minimum essentials. They must in short ‘think globally and act locally’.

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This guideline states that: “human creativity demands that globalization includes activities in the intellectual and cultural domains”, which is then further translated into specific principles whereby the global doctor must: 27. demonstrate sensitivity to cultural and personal factors that improve interactions with patients and the community; 39. evaluate health problems and advise patients taking into account physical, psychological, social and cultural factors; 41. [acquire] knowledge of important life-style, genetic, demographic, environmental, social, economic, psychological, and cultural determinants of health and illness of a population as a whole.

A general yet concrete definition describes culture as “integrated patterns of learned beliefs and behaviors shared among groups” (Kohls 2001: 25). These influence the thoughts, actions, customs, beliefs, institutions and discourse of such groups. Thus medical intercultural competence is looked upon as “a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency or among professionals and enable that system, agency or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations” (Cross 1989: 13). They are associated with the ability to identify and deal effectively with cultural barriers affecting both caregiver and care receiver covering a range of asymmetrical expectations that include patient fears that their right, and ability, to choose treatments will be thwarted, e.g. that the caregiver will reject the patient’s culturally and religiously inspired personal health beliefs (Anand / Lahiri 2009). In developing appropriate frameworks, researchers dealing with medicine and medical education have generally focused on forces that shape an individual’s culture as identified by anthropologists and sociologists (Betancourt 2003): race and ethnicity; nationality; language; gender; religion; socioeconomic status (in turn divided into social status and economic status); physical and mental ability; sexual orientation; occupation. Each gives rise to values, which in turn influence behaviour. They have a special effect on medical diagnosis, treatment and follow-up and combine to shape the cultural framework of both the medical professional and the patient. Trainee doctors need appropriate education so that they can understand how these forces can end up opposing each other in the treatment process, adversely affecting it or, more constructively, can instead be made to work together when properly handled. The need for intercultural training has become well-known in recent years thanks to research in various parts of the world. Several American studies have identified adverse consequences in patient care when effective intercultural understanding is absent, ranging from patient dissatisfaction, poor

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adherence to treatment, worse health outcomes and racial/ethnic disparities in care (Berger 1998; Betancourt 2003; Smedley et al. 2003). As Table 5 shows, major medical education and accreditation bodies around the world have reached the conclusion that medical intercultural competence is essential for effective diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. 1 The Institute for International Medical Education has developed the GMER (Global Minimum Essential Requirements) principles arguing that good medical practice depends on mutual understanding and a relationship between the doctor, patient and family, based on respect for the patient’s welfare, cultural diversity, beliefs and autonomy (http://www.iime.org/gmer.htm). 2 The UK General Medical Council instructions clearly state that: “[...] you must adequately assess the patient’s conditions, taking account of their history (including the symptoms and psychological, spiritual, social and cultural factors), their views and values” (UK General Medical Council 2013n 15a http://www.gmcuk.org/Personal_beliefs_and_medical_practice.pdf_51462245.pdf). 3 The USMLE (U.S. Medical Licensing Exam 2013) includes “gender, ethnic and behavioral considerations affecting disease treatment and prevention [...], psychosocial, cultural [...] gender and ethnic factors” in their exam questions (USMLE 2013: http://www.usmle.org/pdfs/step1/2013midMay2014_Step1.pdf). 4 Physician-patient communication, a patient-centred approach and respect for individual needs and values are components of culturally competent care, argue the Association of American Medical Colleges “Cultural Competence Education” 2005: (https://www.aamc.org/download/54338/data/) and Harvard Medical School (http://hms.harvard.edu/departments/medical-education). 5 The Australian Medical Council (2010) has stated that medical graduates should demonstrate “Respect for community values, including an appreciation of the diversity of human background and cultural values” (http://www. amc.org.au/images/Medschool/standards.pdf). 6 Educational directive 21 (http://www.lcme.org/publications/functions.pdf) of the Liaison Committee on Medical Education of Canada and USA states: “The faculty and students must demonstrate an understanding of the manner in which people of diverse cultures and belief systems perceive health and illness and respond to various symptoms, diseases, and treatments,” and that “Medical students must learn to recognize and appropriately address gender and cultural bias in themselves and others, and in the process of health care delivery”. 7 The University Hospitals of Geneva state that doctors who work with patients from diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds “need to know how culture and language can influence clinical communication and care, and learn the skills necessary to identify and respond effectively to patients’ diverse needs” (Hudelson et al. 2011: (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6920/11/63;www.swiss-mfh.ch).

Table 5. A sample of institutions committed to medical intercultural competence

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Research has led many institutions to advocate the need for medical professionals to be medically and interculturally competent, and uphold the need for communication skills that embrace and respect diversity. Harvard University, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Southern California, the University of California Irvine are just a few of the growing number of universities that have introduced such courses in recent years, often in the first year of medical undergraduate degree courses. Increased access to quality care for all (Anand 2004) is clearly a significant result of training in medical intercultural competence.

Course content, surveys and findings The internationally accepted need for medical intercultural competence was the basis for a CLIL Medical English course in the University of Pavia. In the past, in Italy the focus in courses in Medical and Scientific English simply tended to fall in line with the most obvious facts – that medical research is mostly published in English (Maher 1986) and that doctors need to interact with colleagues at international conferences in English (Wulff 2004) – with the result that communication skills in English in the medical sector were geared, first and foremost, to the reading and discussion of medical publications in English. But Italy is now facing new challenges that have placed intercultural competence in the healthcare sector centre stage. Quite apart from the emerging need to demonstrate proficiency in English if they wish to gain experience in hospitals abroad or to be licensed to work in them (Ribes / Ros 2010), budding doctors need to reckon with the continuing flow of immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and, above all, North Africa. This influx of immigrants has ensured that medical personnel will almost certainly come to deal with patients speaking English as a second or third, rather than first, language, a new experience for Italy and one which has exacerbated, rather than diminished, communicative and cultural asymmetries in doctor-patient relationships. The size of the problem cannot be underestimated. There are now more than 5 million “legal” immigrants in Italy, of whom 1.3 million are EU citizens (Dossier CaritasMigrantes 2012). Illegal immigrants were estimated a few years ago at more than 450,000 (Fondazione ISMU 2011, http://www.ismu.org/ patrimonioeintercultura). ISTAT, the Italian State’s Official Office for Statistics, recently reported an increase of approximately 100,000 in legal immigrants over the previous year, up by 8.2% since 2012 (ISTAT: Gli stranieri al 15° Censimento della Popolazione 2013). How many illegal immigrants need to be added to the current official population in Italy

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(around 61 million) is guesswork, but highly publicised events, like boatpeople landings in Lampedusa, suggest these figures are conservative with a high proportion of “clandestine arrivals” needing urgent medical care. Question

A

B

1. How relevant are ethnic, racial and sociocultural 15 9 factors in your clinical care of patients? 2. How competent do you feel in communicating with 0 2 patients of different cultural and/or socioeconomic backgrounds? 3. How competent do you feel caring for a patient who 0 10 insists on using or seeking alternative therapies or healers? 4. How competent do you feel in being able to identify 0 12 beliefs that are not expressed by the patient or caregiver (family) but might interfere with the treatment regime? 5. How competent do you feel in addressing patients 0 12 in culturally appropriate ways that result in a therapeutic alliance? 6. How competent are you in terms of being attentive to 4 15 nonverbal cues or the use of culturally specific gestures that might have different meanings in different cultures? 7. How competent are you in interpreting different 0 15 cultural expressions of pain, distress and suffering? 8. How competent do you feel in discussing sexuality 3 19 with people in whose culture such issues are highly sensitive? 9. How competent do you feel in making mental 3 23 health referrals, which in some cultures might be seen as stigmatizing? 10. How competent do you feel in advising a patient 1 6 to change behaviours or practices related to cultural beliefs that impair one’s health? 11. How competent do you think you are in working with 14 14 a colleague who makes derogatory remarks about patients from particular ethnic or socioeconomic groups? OVERALL PERCENTAGES PER LEVEL 3.6 12.5

C

D

E

16

36

24

34

47

17

54

31

5

46

34

8

36

43

9

26

40

15

26

47

12

41

29

8

46

20

8

48

37

8

40

26

6

37.5 35.4 11

Table 6. Pre-test given at the beginning of the course None of this was even imaginable only a few years ago, and while a Saturday night visit to the Emergency wards of Italian hospitals provides a dramatic illustration of Italy’s rapid transformation into a multicultural society, a Monday morning visit to the medical undergraduate classroom, including lessons in Medical and Scientific English, provides a poignant

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reminder of the fact that little or nothing is being done as regards training, a laissez-faire approach destined to make coping in many already-stressful medical contexts that much harder. The University of Pavia’s medical program – with two degree courses in medicine, one taught in Italian (with, obviously, the exception of the course in English) and one taught in English – is a prime candidate for a CLIL course. CLIL combines foreign language learning with specific “content” on medical topics but there is no reason why it should not include intercultural competence. On the contrary, as explained here, there are very good reasons for so doing. Accordingly, students were given basic training adapted from the international management and diplomatic fields for cross-cultural communication training. This included: 1) raising cultural awareness; 2) developing cultural sensitivity; 3) building crosscultural communication skills required in the medical field as identified by research (Mostow et al. 2010; Casse 1981; Gannon 2004; Moran et al. 2007; U.S. Peace Corps Training Handbook 2012). Case studies, discussions, lectures, reading assignments, interactive lessons with role playing, cooperative learning groups, “mini” presentations and questionnaire-filling carried out in pairs and groups were the main techniques used (Phillips / Boyacigiller 2004: 76-83). Frontal lessons focused on oral skills and online tasks on reading skills and some writing; the primary objective was to build face-to-face medical intercultural competence while using the English language. There was constant monitoring of the groups and their use of English as the language of communication. Evaluation was ongoing during both frontal lessons and online tasks. The end of course evaluation was a written exam based on the principles defined and explored during the course. Formative tests were set up to measure both the acquisition of the basic principles of medical intercultural competence and overall mastery of a B2 level in English, which was all the more necessary as the students often demonstrated a significant imbalance in their English language skills. There were no absolute beginners, but the weak areas were listening and speaking which restricted the students’ ability to profit from opportunities to interact with confidence. During the course the students learned to analyse websites using multimodal analysis (Baldry / Thibault 2006), all part of sharpening their analytical reading skills and capacity to fathom cultural issues. But just how aware were the students as regards the existence of cultural barriers? How aware were they that this is no trivial matter? Pre-course and post-course research was conducted to provide answers to these questions and, above all, to ascertain the degree to which basic awareness was being stimulated over time.

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Question a. How competent do you feel in caring for a patient who insists on using or seeking alternative therapies or healers? b. How competent do you feel in being able to identify beliefs that are not expressed by the patient or caregiver (family) but might interfere with the treatment regime? c. How competent do you feel in addressing patients in culturally appropriate ways that result in a therapeutic alliance? d. How competent are you in terms of being attentive to nonverbal cues or the use of culturally specific gestures that might have different meanings in different cultures? e. How competent are you in interpreting different cultural expressions of pain, distress and suffering? f. How competent do you feel in discussing sexuality with people in whose culture such issues are highly sensitive? g. How competent do you feel in making mental health referrals that in some cultures might be seen as stigmatizing? h. How competent are you at advising a patient to change behaviours or practices related to cultural beliefs that impair one’s health? PERCENTAGES PER LEVEL PER YEAR OVERALL PERCENTAGES PER LEVEL

A

B

C

D

E

Yr 3: 10 Yr 3: 25 Yr 3: 49 Yr 3: 13 Yr 3: 3 Yr 4: 10 Yr 4: 40 Yr 4: 25 Yr 4: 15 Yr 4: 10

Yr 3: 4 Yr 3: 30 Yr 3: 43 Yr 3: 15 Yr 3: 7 Y r 4 : 5 Yr 4: 20 Yr 4: 60 Yr 4: 10 Y r 4 : 5

Yr 3: 4 Yr 4: 5

Yr 3: 21 Yr 3: 40 Yr 3: 24 Yr 4: 6 Yr 4: 30 Yr 4: 40 Yr 4: 20 Yr 4: 5

Yr 3: 9 Yr 3: 25 Yr 3: 32 Yr 3: 30 Yr 3: 4 Yr 4: 14 Yr 4: 19 Yr 4: 24 Yr 4: 33 Yr 4: 19

Yr 3: 6 Yr 4: 5

Yr 3: 25 Yr 3: 28 Yr 3: 30 Yr 3: 10 Yr 4: 35 Yr 4: 15 Yr 4: 30 Yr 4: 15

Yr 3: 12 Yr 3: 25 Yr 3: 32 Yr 3: 24 Yr 3: 7 Yr 4: 20 Yr 4: 35 Yr 4: 20 Yr 4: 25 Yr 4: 0 Yr 3: 9 Yr 3: 30 Yr 3: 40 Yr 3: 15 Yr 3: 6 Yr 4: 19 Yr 4: 43 Yr 4: 29 Yr 4: 5 Yr 4: 5

Yr 3: 4 Yr 3: 19 Yr 3: 37 Yr 3: 27 Yr 3: 12 Yr 4: 15 Yr 4: 15 Yr 4: 30 Yr 4: 30 Yr 4: 10 Yr 3: 8.1 Yr 3:25.1 Yr 3:37.6 Yr 3:22.3 Yr 3: 6.9 Yr 4:11.6 Yr 4:30.1 Yr 4:31.3 Yr 4:19.1 Yr 4: 7.8 9.9

27.6

34.5

Table 7. Post-test on Medical Intercultural Competence

20.7

7.3

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Research gathered from international sources (Hudelson et al. 2011; Shapiro et al. 2003) was put together to form two surveys. The first, treated as a pre-test, measured the lack/presence of intercultural competence among a group of approximately 400 third-year and fourth-year medical students attending the compulsory course in Medical English (who had taken their very first steps in interactions with patients in ward rounds). Additionally, this first survey was compiled by a group of 58 students (ranging from 1st to 6th year) applying for an optional self-financed international clerkship in hospitals abroad (SISM: www.nazionale. sism.org) and who were likely to be sensitive to intercultural issues.

Interpreting the findings How do we interpret these findings? On the face of it, it would seem that the strategy of combining CLIL-type instruction in English with cross-cultural training seems to have the effect of raising the CEFR level. Final results showed an improvement (of .5) in CEFR levels in the area of spoken communication in 40 hours. At the same time, the picture regarding intercultural competence is less than clear. The results from both 3rd and 4th year groups were almost identical: approximately 67% of all students had never received any medical intercultural competence training before while most of those who responded positively did not specify what type of training they had received. Various students commented that what they learned about cultures and communicating across cultures would be very important for their future career and, indeed, the final oral exam revealed that all of them had grasped the importance of intercultural competence as it applies to patient care. It would appear that what is happening is that, as they progress in their medical education, students become increasingly aware of what they underestimated earlier on. This is in keeping with the fact that 4th year students with greater exposure to patients than the 3rd year students (the medical program provides for this contact as from the second semester of the 3rd year) admitted more freely to their lack of preparation. If education is to be considered as awareness, then the results of the survey provide what may perhaps be termed “an inversely proportional measurement” of students’ growing awareness: higher rates of admission of unfulfilled training requirements correspond, in actual fact, to a higher level of intercultural competence and possibly to a level of achievement in their medical education that is more in keeping with GMER tenets. The results of the student surveys assisted in the direction and creation of a Medical English CLIL course. The students seemed to appreciate the

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new intercultural knowledge and awareness obtained as well as the empowerment that comes with self-understanding. Finding out that they were not as intercultural as they thought drove them to a new level of understanding. Those that had either already worked abroad in a hospital or had begun hospital training confirmed that dealing with multicultural patients presented an unexpected challenge. This course was a small step in the provision of effective healthcare to a growing number of immigrant patients receiving treatment in the Italian healthcare system. Apart from the obvious issues of saving lives and money by providing effective treatment the first time around, it is also a human rights issue. Healthcare issues can be a great divider between immigrant and local patients. Medical professionals must be able to form a working alliance with all patients.

Part VI: Towards an international profile for medical students The previous sections with their focus on self-evaluation and selfassessment draw conclusions about the capacity of students to deploy and interpret communication and interactional skills in English in a variety of medical contexts and from a variety of standpoints. They are in keeping with the goal of measuring and validating the application of CEFR, GMER and OSCE frameworks and highlight in particular the relevance of GMER principles. As such, they are a preliminary but essential step relating to specific contexts in the Italian University system. Each contribution is also a local interpretation of the Offerta didattica, which appears in the Italian Education Ministry’s website (www.miur.it). This lists the specific objectives for every degree course in every Italian university; there is often little variation from one university to another, as is the case with the six-year medical degree where the syllabus is more or less standard throughout Italy, much of it little more than a direct translation of the GMER principles (Loiacono 2011; 2012c: 74-77; 2013a). As mentioned in Part I, the contributions given above consolidate the conclusions reached in a previous set of papers on Medical CLIL in Italy (Arizzi 2012: 189-192; Baldry 2012; Coccetta 2012; Kantz 2012; Loiacono 2102; Maggi 2012). But can a Medical CLIL course embrace the principles of multilingualism and multiculturalism (Loiacono 2013b) enshrined in the GMER principles within an international training spectrum? That is, to what degree can harmonisation of the local interpretations of the GMER principles that the vast majority of degree

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courses in Europe subscribe to be achieved within a European context? Objectives such as multilingualism and multiculturalism have successfully been promoted on a European scale by such EU institutions as the European Commission and the European Parliament. The Comenius project, for example, was effective not just as regards overall knowledge of foreign languages (62% of the schoolchildren involved improved their English-language skills) but also as regards intercultural competences, with 80% of the teachers involved in the project reporting very strong interest (Spennati 2013: 47). The next ‘logical’ step in the research group’s investigations was to move beyond the Italian context and carry out some form of international comparison reflecting cultural, as well as linguistic, diversity. The GMER framework establishes minimum essential requirements for the global doctor but, equally clearly, states that their implementation must respect local traditions. In general, this somewhat contradictory position raises questions about measuring and validating the application of the GMER principles in relation to the local/global divide, a matter which includes bioethical considerations such as global obligations towards life in general, regardless of whether those obligations are rooted in Western or Eastern ideologies (Muzur / Martin-Sass 2012). Specifically, how, one wonders, can the development of video-based CLIL-oriented syllabuses help improve communication and interaction skills in the biomedical sector in ways that go beyond the courses developed by individual teachers working in one specific local context? The attempt to find an answer to these questions which have far-reaching consequences is precisely the raison d’être for the research reported here. The goals of the overall research are thus not to find out whether one group of students is better prepared than another, but rather to carry out preliminary surveys that establish whether it is indeed possible to measure the potential for a video-based CLIL syllabus to contribute to the application of the GMER principles and vice-versa. In this respect, there can be no convenient under-the-carpet sweeping of cultural diversity (see in this respect Section 2.3 McDonaldization or Local Globalization? in Katan 2004). Any comparison between groups of students from different countries must focus on diversity (Gjuran-Coha / Kriškoviü 2013) which needs to be included, rather than excluded, if better surveys are to be developed. This is a challenge in itself as it means understanding and respecting diversity which requires those involved to show considerable courage and honesty. Accordingly, this section reports on the findings of surveys carried out in relation to two cohorts of students attending degree courses in Medicine and Surgery in the University of Rijeka (Croatia) and the University of

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Foggia (Italy) where it was expected that, despite being closer to each other than some of the other cities involved in the project, at least as the crow flies, some degree of cultural diversity would arise. In actual fact, as reported below, the findings show that the degree of comparability and similarity was much higher than expected, suggesting, in part, the need for, and possibility of comparisons relating to, EU communities that are culturally and linguistically even farther apart. They also highlight gaps in cross-border training at an overall European level that hinder the application of the GMER principles.10 The first survey related to a general profile of two cohorts of students. The first cohort (CR) relates to 62 students in Rijeka, Croatia, in the fifth year of their 6-year degree course in Medicine, while the second (IT) relates to 85 students in Foggia, Italy, attending the first, second and third years of their degree course, also six years in duration. The survey was divided into three sections, the first entitled About you. Table 8 points to differences in age, gender and year of enrolment that readers can interpret for themselves, bearing in mind that the Italian school-leaving age (for the purposes of University enrolment) is 19, i.e. a year later than most of their European counterparts. CR IT CR IT CR IT

1st year

2nd year

3rd year

49%

36%

15%

Male 23 46 19 20 0 0 23 28

21 1 16

37% 54% 22 8 3

23 30 3

4th year

Female 39 39 24 25 26 14 3 1 3 0 3

5th year 100%

63% 46% 27 2 0

6th year

28 2 1

28+ 1 5

Table 8. Year of enrolment, gender and age It was assumed that the majority of students from both cohorts would 10

The opportunity to do so arose from an LLP-ERASMUS Staff Mobility exchange visit in January 2013. Thanks go to the Faculty of Medicine in Rijeka for its hospitality and interest in the furtherance of this research. In this respect, special thanks go to Amir Muzur (Head of Department of Social Sciences and Medical Humanities, University of Rijeka) and to Anamarija Gjuran-Coha and Arijana Kriskovic, members of the same Department. Thanks must go to all the students who took part demonstrating a willingness to interpret abstract principles in a consistent way.

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have a clear idea about the direction of their studies and their future careers. One way to verify this is to ask students about their intended specialisations after the completion of their first degree. Even where the students opt for family or general medicine (Primary Care) as opposed to a career in hospital medicine (Secondary Care), there is strong pressure both in Croatia and Italy for medical education to continue with specialisations. The data in Table 9 show that 39% of the CR cohort and 49% of the IT cohort had not decided on any future specialisation. But among those who had made up their mind (61% of 5th year students and 51% of 1st to 3rd year students) what is striking is the similarity rather than the diversity, with a marked preference for Secondary Care predominating and with Surgery in particular attracting the most highly-motivated students. It may well be that the “none” category corresponds to those who will become a GP (i.e. concerned with Primary Care), a matter requiring further investigation.

None Anaesthesiology Cardiology Dermatology Endocrinology Family medicine Genetics Gynaecology Haematology Immunology Internal medicine Nephrology Neurology Occupational Medicine Oncology Ophthalmology Orthopaedics Paediatrics Pathology Psychiatry Radiology Surgery Urology

Table 9. Intended specialisations

CR

IT

24 1 0 4 0 2 0 2 0 0 7 1 2 0 1 1 0 2 1 1 3 9 1 62

41 1 1 0 1 1 1 2 1 1 0 0 8 1 1 1 2 4 0 4 0 13 1 85

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What is perhaps surprising is the large number of students who have made up their mind early on in their careers about their intended professional identity in keeping with our thesis, sketched out below, that greater EU level consideration of cross-border training is required given the ever greater mobility of healthcare professionals in Europe and, as emerges from the surveys, the ever-increasing demand from the current generation of students for such training. This is expressed in terms of their clear awareness that their desire for “hands-on” hospital training is also a call for specialisation at an ever-earlier stage in their studies and careers. Where the two cohorts differ substantially is in their knowledge of foreign languages with 16 students in the CR cohort (26%) indicating knowledge of Italian (Rijeka was part of Italy until the end of World War II), whereas none of the Italian students had any knowledge of Croatian. A greater multicultural and multilinguistic background emerged in the CR cohort as compared with the IT cohort, a difference tempered by the fact, that, from a vocational standpoint, none of the students in either cohort claimed experience of other medical systems. Indeed, one of the major findings of the survey was that only one student (CR cohort) in the overall cohort of 147 students had benefitted from an Erasmus placement, even though all the students could speak English, and in many cases, had some knowledge of a second and (in particular in the CR cohort) a third or fourth European language. At a time when cases of bad medical practice are reported, for example in the British press, which establish a clear link between patient deaths and foreign locum doctors with “language difficulties”,11 experience in hospitals 11 The report by James Meikle in the Guardian Online for Thursday 8 April 2010 (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2010/apr/08/mps-want-action-inept-foreigndoctors) is a good example. Its title is UK must act to prevent patient deaths caused by inept foreign doctors, MPs say Health committee demands change in laws that prevent medical regulators giving language tests to European medics. The report states the chief executive of the UK’s General Medical Council as saying: “Doctors from outside the UK make a significant contribution to healthcare in this country but patient safety must always take priority over the free movement of labour.” The article contains links to various types of communication failures surrounding the specific case at both individual and institutional level. Similarly, the page on the General Medical Council’s website entitled New powers to check doctors’ language skills: give us your views (http://www.gmc-uk.org/ publications/23431.asp) reports the opinions and experiences of almost 300 doctors. They are a compendium of failures in setting and applying language and communication standards: “I grew up speaking English all my life and received all my education up to the University level in English language. I also had postgraduate studies in the UK where I obtained an MSc degree. Despite my

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of other cultural systems, under an EU exchange scheme for budding doctors, might not only help prevent such mistakes but would also (eventually) demonstrate that the underlying causes of inappropriate medical care have to do with an inability to apply the GMER principles in more than one local context. In other words, the thesis put forward here is that, to overcome the local/global GMER “contradiction”, training must be carried out in terms of the many local multilingual and multicultural contexts that characterise European society (and for that matter many other parts of the world). Application of medical knowledge in multiple national locations is a traditional part of the long process of medical education but which, in contemporary Europe in particular, is artificially held back by a lack of planned cross-border training. Trainee doctors are not mere sponges absorbing medical knowledge: they are also learning to develop and express their personalities and interactional skills in medical contexts.

obvious proficiency in the English language, the GMC required that I had to take the IELTS exams before I could get registered. I was thus surprised when I met doctors from non-English speaking countries who told me they did not have to take the IELTS because they were from Europe. I think it is discriminatory and not objective not to screen all doctors for English proficiency before they are licensed to practice. This is a welcome move.” Other comments distinguish between language and communication skills: “People are talking about this being ‘‘fair to everyone’’. Whereas testing language knowledge is a good and ‘‘fair’’ idea, communication skills should be tested for both English native speakers and nonnative speakers. Only in this way would it be ‘‘fair to everyone’’.” A further example that highlights various aspects of oral discourse is: “This is long overdue. Given that communication is a fundamental part of a doctor’s practice especially a GP’s, all doctors need to have the ability to speak clearly enough for all members of society to understand them including the elderly and hard of hearing. The amount of extra work generated for other doctors/hcps to pick up on account of poor verbal communication skills is enormous in the NHS. I am astonished that this problem has not already been addressed.” Equally interesting are the views of EU doctors: “I am a European doctor who worked in the UK for 16 years (now back home). My first language is Spanish and all my training was done in Spanish. Even if my English was good on arrival [sic] to England, I struggled with many things (phrasal verbs, jargon, medical vocabulary, abbreviations, local accents, metaphors and many more). Luckily, I don’t think any of my patients came to any harm but they could have easily got hurt. The system doesn’t protect patients from people like me. Funny enough, non-European docs who are mostly trained in English get exhaustive exams that most European colleagues wouldn’t be able to pass. Checking all doctors’ language skills is a must, not only in England but in the rest of Europe too! Political correctness.”

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The global doctor’s personality The grounds for putting forward this thesis re-emerge in the second section of the survey, concerned with Evaluation. In tune with what has been stated above, this survey also attempts to measure efforts to break away from foreign language evaluation based exclusively on the CEFR framework and to entertain other options, in primis the GMER and OSCE frameworks with their clear reference to the medical workplace. Table 10 shows a CEFR distribution which shows clustering around the B1/B2 levels (dark grey) in the central columns. The rightward shift of the CR cohort as compared with the leftward shift of the IT cohort (both shown in light grey) may be explained by the CR cohort’s greater number of years of tuition in English at university than the IT cohort. When we further analyse the IT cohort (data not shown) we find this trend is confirmed, with the first-year cohort more leftward-shifted than the third-year cohort.

CR CR % IT IT %

A1 3 4.8 11 13

A2 9 14 19 22

B1 17 27.5 38 40

B2 17 27 15 18

C1 13 21 2 2

C2 3 4 0 0

Table 10. Self-assessed level of English proficiency based on CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference) The search for alternative methods of self-evaluation in the sphere of medical competences and their interdependency with communication skills, essential for a correct understanding of the application of the GMER principles and relative evaluation, led us to pose alternative questions. The first of these, shown in Table 11, relates to characterising the global doctor’s personality, measured in terms of the priorities given by students, with each student allowed to express more than one preference (though, in actual fact, the majority opted for a single priority). The data point strongly to an increasing capacity over time to make judgements and also to the great value students attach to their growing medical personality, which is even more prized in postgraduate specialisation degrees (Loiacono 2012a).

CEFR, GMER or OSCE? Investigations into Medical CLIL

N°: CR: IT: IT:

411

A. B. C. D. E. Ward No English Communication Knowledge experience & Reply Language skills patient skills

G. Cultural skills

Total Replies

13 16,5 32 33.0

12 15.2 7 7.2

79 100% 97 100%

4 5.05 6 6.2

16 20.25 4 4.1

20 25.3 23 23.7

14 17.7 25 25.8

Table 11. The global doctor’s personality These findings are backed up by the fact that the slightly older CR cohort shows a more even distribution, and perhaps greater maturity, as compared with the IT cohort, regarding preferences and priorities. The CR cohort clusters, in keeping with the choice of intended specialisations, around medical knowledge and ward experience. What stands out is the similar significance attributed to English, though the CR cohort privileged language and communication skills in general rather more than the IT cohort, a matter requiring further investigation in a follow-up study. TOPIC AREAS FOR MEDICAL ENGLISH SKILLS IMPROVEMENT 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 2 9 10 I

C

I C I C I C I C I C I C I C I C I C

1. Using video and 19 21 15 6 11 10 2 11 4 10 6 6 7 other Internet resources 2. Listening to foreign 14 19 12 19 9 11 5 16 6 11 8 10 9 lecturers 3. Using good written materials 4. Going abroad on Erasmus projects 5. Using social networks 6. Attending lessons with a good teacher

12 8

7

9 12 14 11 13 8 200

3 14 3 13 3

6 11 11 7 10 8 13 12 6 11 19 19 14 8

20 32 8 16 11 6

2 11 6

5

7

8

4

8

5

6

1

3

5 11 9

6

9

6 200

5

7 200

8 30 2 200

8 10 6 15 6 10 13 15 14 14 14 15 5 12 19 1

22 13 12 10 5 16 1 17 5

6

2 14 7

8 19 3

8

4 200

5 19 8 200

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7. Working abroad in 25 25 9 16 5 17 6 hospitals 8.Improving 9 8 9 8 13 3 6 grammar 9.Attending private 2 17 8 English courses 10. Other: 14 3 1 (specify):

6

2

8

2

5

4

8

8

8 16 2 23 5 200

6

7

8

8 11 12 8 16 27 8 11 12 10 200

3 13 3

7

5 12 17 9 11 20 13 13 10 12 13 4

0

9

0 24 2 13 0

4

0

7

0

7

0

6

8 200

2 15 93 200

Table 12. Which of the topics do you think would be useful as regards improving your communicative skills in Medical English? Indeed, Table 12 measures the comparative ratings given percentagewise by the two cohorts for various learning contexts that involve language skills. Specifically, it provides ratings on a scale of 1-10, with 1 as the most important and 10 the least important. There are some divergences. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Obtain a medical history relevant to the patient’s complaint. Perform a clinical examination that is targeted at the patient’s chief complaint. Obtain a psychosocial history from the patient. Announce bad news (unfavourable prognosis). Make sure that an illiterate (in the host country language) patient understands the treatment of his chronic disease. 6. Explain the reason for refusing an unjustified treatment or investigation to a patient who requests it. 7. Discuss the advantages and risks of unconventional therapies with a patient who uses them. 8. Discuss a patient’s religious preferences and constraints regarding his/ her treatment. 9. Communicate the importance of medical treatment to a patient who believes that his/her illness is due to supernatural causes. 10. Empathize the migration experience and possible traumatic experiences of an asylum seeker or migrant. 11. Orient an undocumented immigrant patient towards appropriate medical and social services. 12. Ask questions and give information to the husband/wife of a patient, if s/he requests it. 13. Perform an international protocol for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. 14. Interpret and explain an ECG in English. 15. Use the resources provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, such as PubMed or OMIM.

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16. Find resources that help you understand disease or medical concepts beyond those in your mother-tongue. 17. Evaluate and adopt the International Guidelines applied to your main field of interest (such as Management of Acute Myocardial Infarction in patients presenting with ST-segment elevation). 18. Report a physical examination on a patient to other doctors in English. 19. Make a diagnosis in medical and lay English? That is, are you able to use English appropriately, changing your way of saying things to a colleague and a patient? 20. Face a dramatic medical emergency with the required coolness.

Table 13. Self-evaluation in medical and communication skills: 20 GMER-inspired can-do statements For example, one in three in the CR cohort ranked going abroad on an Erasmus placement (Q.4) as their top priority while only 1 in 5 in the IT cohort (20%) made this choice, a matter partly explainable perhaps by the expectations raised by Croatia’s (at the time) imminent membership of the European Union. What emerges otherwise from this table is the similarity in the replies. Thus, for example, 25% of students in both cohorts, i.e. one in four rated experience in foreign hospitals (Q.7) as their top priority. Similarly, if we compare the reply for Q.6, Attending lessons, we find that, taken together, the first three columns again exactly match, with 39% of both the CR and IT cohorts placing good quality classroom teaching in English in the top three rating categories (i.e. 1, 2 and 3). Moreover, both cohorts, attribute a low rating to (traditional) grammar (Q.8) scored as 9% and 8% respectively in the top two rating categories (i.e. 1 and 2). Finally, one in five students placed the use of video and Internet in both cohorts in the top category (i.e. 1). The third and final section of this first survey related specifically to competences encapsulated in the GMER principles. The precise formulation is, however, a compromise between the GMER principles as such and the can-do format associated with the CEFR framework, very much the subject of experimentation in Parts III and IV of this chapter. Table 13 lists 20 GMER-inspired performance-related can-do statements included in the survey that either explicitly or implicitly relate to a combined use of medical knowledge and communication skills. The same rating scale as used throughout this chapter was again applied, in Table 14, which reports scores for each of the can-do statements in Table 13, with the A Column relating to the lowest level performance rating and E the highest. The CR cohort claimed to have a higher performance rate than the Italian cohort, which is only to be

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expected given their greater experience. What is also not surprising, but is highly relevant to the thesis advanced here, are the five can-do statements, checked in grey in Table 13 for which, as reported in Table 14, the CR cohort indicated the highest interactional difficulties (i.e. 5% or more in the lowest category of competence). They all involve a high level of stress management. It should be recalled that stress management is an important factor in emergency action, in particular in ‘other culture, other language’ situations. Stress management is not, though, part of the medical curriculum, however fundamental it may be in OSCE testing which, as it were, deliberately puts students on the spot:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

IT 33 54 32 27 27 27 28 30 22 29 34 20 54 57 44 19 53 41 51 34 35.8

A CR 3 0 0 6 2 0 2 2 2 2 5 0 6 6 3 0 0 0 3 5 2.35

IT 28 25 34 24 27 29 22 25 27 30 30 26 15 20 18 24 19 34 27 16 25

B CR 5 5 6 21 10 6 5 19 10 6 11 6 13 24 8 3 14 10 8 8 9.9

IT 16 8 14 25 18 19 22 26 27 26 21 30 13 12 15 25 13 15 14 18 18.85

C CR 14 27 29 33 24 29 29 27 38 34 33 16 27 30 27 24 33 30 34 36 28.7

IT 19 9 14 22 20 21 20 18 14 11 13 19 7 6 14 27 8 9 7 25 15.15

D CR 38 47 38 29 39 40 42 38 29 41 41 51 37 30 40 35 40 41 38 32 38.3

E IT 4 4 6 2 8 4 8 1 10 4 2 5 11 5 9 5 7 1 1 7 5.2

CR 40 21 27 11 25 25 22 14 21 17 10 27 17 10 22 38 13 19 17 19 20.7

Table 14. Self-assessed performance ratings for 20 GMER-inspired can-do statements To avoid many of the disadvantages of the traditional clinical examination we have introduced the structured clinical examination. In this, students rotate round a series of stations in the hospital ward. At one station, they

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are asked to carry out a procedure, such as take a history, undertake one aspect of physical examination, or interpret laboratory investigations in the light of a patient’s problem, and at the next station they have to answer questions on the findings at the previous station and their interpretation. As they cannot go back to check on omissions, multiple-choice questions have a minimal cueing effect. The students may be observed and scored at some stations by examiners using a check list. In the structured clinical examination the variables and complexity of the examination are more easily controlled, its aims can be more clearly defined, and more of the student’s knowledge can be tested. The examination is more objective and a marking strategy can be decided in advance. The examination results in improved feed-back to students and staff (Harden et al. 1975: 447). It thus comes as no surprise that the 5th year CR students have picked these five principles out. Stress management is defined as an area of training that is closely linked to medical communication skills (Merriman / Westcott 2010) and which has received considerable attention in the recent publications of the author of this section (Loiacono 2012b; 2012c; 2013a) in part as a result of the findings of the research reported here. The findings presented in Tables 13 and 14 are further evidence of the need for OSCE-type tests inspired by GMER principles to be incorporated in Medical CLIL.

Translating GMER inspired can-do statements into Medical CLIL simulations Interestingly, the can-do statement where both cohorts indicated the lowest level of readiness was no. 14: “Interpret and explain an ECG in English” (6% for the CR and 57% for the IT cohort). This may be linked to a specific question in the second survey that was submitted to both cohorts relating to their understanding of the simulated clinical case presented in ForWard. This survey consisted in 10 multiple-choice questions and specifically included a request to pick out which of five ECGs proposed was the correct one for STEMI, the precise question being: Are you able to recognize the patient’s ECG? Note that the patient has been diagnosed for STEMI, ST Elevation Myocardial Infarction V1V4. The top row of Figure 9 shows the correct answer (Loiacono 2013a. 102) while the trace in the bottom row (Loiacono 2013a: 88) shows normal sinus rhythm. For the reader’s sake, a circle has been placed in the top row around the crucial detail that the students should have been looking for. In fact, 42% of the IT cohort and 48% of the CR cohort gave the correct answer. It is important to recognise that the IT cohort had more

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opportunities to work with the simulated clinical case presented in ForWard in general than the CR cohort. This explains the comparable rates of identification in the two cohorts despite the difference in the number of years of medical education. The discrepancy between accurate grasp of medical knowledge and perceived capacity to communicate that knowledge in English in the top category (CR 6%; IT 57%) suggests that video is a good way of making students aware of the perils of overconfidence in interaction (cf. Part V): the IT cohort had more time to absorb the lessons in ForWard on STEMI than the CR cohort as regards the difficulties in communication. Which is the lesser evil, overconfidence or under-confidence, is debatable; greater self-awareness among students of this bias and ways of measuring it are not.

Figure 9: Reading an ECG: abnormal (above) vs. normal (below) sinus rhythm

The effects of familiarity with English and the cultural systems of English-speaking countries can be further detected in relation to other questions: Alex Van der Velde is the new trainee doctor. Today he starts work in the “Ospedali Riuniti” in Foggia. The Hospital Management decided to improve the medical staff’s skills, in English in a real emergency situation because of the large number of foreigners hospitalised. This is a very good opportunity for Alex’s career. According to the video: What is the Department to which Alex is assigned? A) Cardiology Department B) Anaesthesiology Department C) A&E Department D) Surgery Department E) Emergency Desk.

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All of the CR cohort and 32% of the IT cohort chose the last option, whereas 59% of the IT cohort correctly identified A&E Department as the right answer. This suggests that OSCE-oriented medical training films such as ForWard are able, in part, to create virtual hospitals that simulate hospital “culture” and to satisfy the need to understand how different Public Health systems work (Loiacono 2012c). We are now in a position to draw some conclusions as regards the internationalisation of training, at least in terms of contact with the English-speaking world. Certainly, in recent years the EU has offered its students many opportunities as regards mobility, training, study periods abroad, and cross-border recognition of credits and qualifications. Even so, there is a gap between students’ expectations about international training and working as doctors in English-speaking countries, keenly felt by the groups of students surveyed, and the realities as regards obstacles that prevent these opportunities from materialising. In this respect, we may recall that as from June 2014 the General Medical Council, the senior body in charge of medical training and the exercise of the medical profession in the UK, has raised the bar as regards the CEFR score required for non-UK nationals to a level much higher than that achieved currently in Italy and probably elsewhere by many undergraduate students: Doctors from overseas wanting to practise in the UK will need to achieve an overall score of 7.5 out of 9 in the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) test – up from the current score of seven. The new requirement will be introduced at the same time as new language checks on European doctors. http://www.gmc-uk.org/news/23792.asp.

Other important UK medical institutions, such as the Health and Care Professions Council (http://www.hpc-uk.org/), currently regulating 16 healthcare professions, e.g. speech and language therapists, dieticians, physiotherapists, and paramedics, are clearly moving in a direction that requires a much higher degree of integration between medical content and communicative competence in English within an international perspective.

Part VII: Conclusions There are many conclusions that can be drawn from what has been reported above:

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(a) the need for student exchange schemes, real or virtual, even at an undergraduate level as a form of investment in the construction of the European Union; (b) the appropriateness in the biomedical sector of CLIL as a means of implementing international frameworks and achieving an appropriate level of engagement with international teaching and testing frameworks of biomedical and not just linguistic origin; (c) the empowerment that this brings to teachers of biomedical English vis-à-vis their ‘biomedical’ colleagues and the consolidation of English as a discipline rather than as a service in their eyes; (d) the empowerment that this brings for students in relation to the development of their medical personality, a matter closely related to the multiple local contexts in which the global doctor works, that often cause strong human rights issues to emerge; (e) the soundness of multimedia/multimodal approaches to Medical CLIL that involve a high level of student self-assessment and participation in course outcomes such as the selection, rating and re-organisation (e.g. through addition of interpretative overlays) of videos on medical themes. The main conclusion to be drawn, however, relates to research procedure and the need for, and value of, triangulation. This chapter has attempted to do this in two ways. First, it points to the need for more micro-level research that compares, as is with the case of the ECG trace, (a) students’ beliefs about their potential to perform in English in relation to a specific task; (b) their actual performance; (c) the links between (a) and (b) that a testing framework allows in relation to real or simulated biomedical contexts. It is simple enough to draw up a single test based on textbook or website medical knowledge that relates (a) and (b), e.g. (a) a self-assessed rating of knowledge (Rate your knowledge on diabetes?) and (b) multiple-choice questions about diabetes (What classifications are applied to diabetes?). But such a test will not link (a) and (b) to (c). Here the second form of triangulation comes into play, finding ways in which real biomedical contexts that invoke the use of English are created or simulated and linked to medical education. These ‘ways’ include crossborder hospital training that involves real or virtual mobility as well as Medical CLIL courses that provide this linkage through reference to international frameworks and to biomedical contexts which, in keeping with the GMER principles, entertain cultural diversity. Research into this triangle cannot be based on a single teacher’s experience but needs to be linked to differing experiences that explore the relationship between (a),

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(b) and (c) and come to independently-reached but shared conclusions. The goal of both the AICLU Medical CLIL workshop and this chapter is to promote the connectivity between teaching-based research projects as a healthy form of confrontation. Ensuring that inter-linked investigations are carried out is, of course, one of the reasons why organisations like AICLU exist.

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italiano. Quaderni di Ricerca del Centro Linguistico d’Ateneo Messinese, Volume I – anno 2007. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore: 41-49. Phillips M.E. / N.A. Boyacigiller 2004. Cultural scanning: an integrated cultural frameworks approach. In N.A. Boyacigiller / R.A. Goodman / M.E. Phillips (eds), Crossing Cultures: Insights from Master Teachers. London: Routledge: 76-88. Prior J. 2009. A Transatlantic e-Tandem – how EFL teaching at the free university of Bozen/Bolzano was supported by a tandem language exchange through video-conferencing. In G. Mansfield / C.J. Taylor (eds), 1997-2007: L’AICLU e la politica linguistica nelle università italiane. V Convegno AICLU, 24-26 maggio 2007. Parma: Tipografia Supergrafica: 119-121. Ribes R. / P.R. Ros 2010. Inglese per Medici. Milan: Springer-Verlag Italia. Rizzo R. 2007. Osservazioni sulla sperimentazione del P.E.L. al Centro Linguistico d’Ateneo Messinese. In M. G. Sindoni (ed.), Presenza e Impatto del Portfolio Europeo delle Lingue sul sistema formativo universitario italiano. Quaderni di Ricerca del Centro Linguistico d’Ateneo Messinese, Volume I – anno 2007. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore: 85-91. —. 2009. Multimodal and Multimedia Aspects of English Language Teaching and Studies in Italian Universities. An e-learning approach. Como-Pavia: Ibis. Scott-Monkhouse A. R. / H.M.M. West 2009. From teacher to teacher – primary school teachers as learners of English: the experiences in Parma, Reggio Emilia and Salsomaggiore Terme. In G. Mansfield / C.J. Taylor 1997-2007: L’AICLU e la politica linguistica nelle università italiane. V Convegno AICLU, 24-26 maggio 2007. Parma: Tipografia Supergrafica: 279-290. Shapiro J. / J. Hollingshead / E. Morrison 2003. Self-perceived attitudes and skills of cultural competence: a comparison of family medicine and internal medicine residents. Medical Teacher 25: 327-329. Sherman J. 2003. Using Authentic Video in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sinclair J. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation: Describing English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sindoni M.G. 2007 (ed.). Presenza e impatto del Portfolio Europeo delle Lingue sul sistema formativo universitario italiano. Atti IX Seminario Internazionale AICLU. [Milazzo, 28 settembre – 02 ottobre 2005].

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Quaderni di Ricerca del Centro Linguistico D’Ateneo Messinese – vol. I/Anno 2007. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. —. 2009. Testing English at University. Some reflections on validation. In M.G. Sindoni (ed.), Testing in University Language Centres, Quaderni di Ricerca del Centro Linguistico d’Ateneo Messinese, Volume II, Anno 2008. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore: 139-151. Sindoni M.G. / R. Rizzo 2009. Learning and assessment procedures at the University of Messina Language Centre (Italy). An integrated approach. Journal of Education, Informatics, and Cybernetics 1/3: 4852. SISM 2012. Segretariato Italiano Studenti in Medicina. At www.nazionale.sism.org. Smedley B.D. / A.Y. Stith / A.R. Nelson 2003. Unequal Treatment Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. Spennati S. 2013. L’Unione Europea e la formazione, cominciamo a parlarne. Collana diretta da Maria Luisa De Natale. Terlizzi, Bari: Editore Insieme. Taylor Torsello C. 2001. La certificazione delle competenze linguistiche. 79 Universitas: 26-29. Taylor Torsello C. / M. Catricalà / J. Morley (eds) 2002. 2001 – Anno europeo delle lingue: proposte della nuova università italiana. Atti del II Convegno Nazionale AICLU. Siena: Terre de Sienne Editrice.

Taylor Torsello C. / M. Gotti 2005. Case study: the CERCLU Project: certification of language competence in Italian University Language Centres. In D. Bickerton / K. Brown / B. Clark / C. Flood (eds), The Good Practice Guide, Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, UK. At https://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/2306. Tuffs R. / I. Tudor 1990. What the eye doesn’t see: cross-cultural problems in the comprehension of video material. RELC Journal 21/ 2: 29-44. U.S. Peace Corps Training Handbook 2012. Culture Matters. At http://wws.peacecorps.gov/wws/publications/culture/. Vygotsky L.S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weir C. 2005. Limitations of the Common European Framework for developing comparable examinations and tests. Language Testing 22/3: 281-300. Whitley M.S. 1993. Communicative language teaching: an incomplete revolution. Foreign Language Annals 26/2: 137-154. Willcoxson L. / M.L. Manning / N. Johnston / K. Gething 2011. Enhancing the research-teaching nexus: building teaching-based

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research from research-based teaching. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 23/1: 1–10. At http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE827.pdf. Wulff H.R. 2004. The language of medicine. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 97/4: 187-188.

PART FIVE: THE USE OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN LANGUAGE LEARNING

CHAPTER TWENTY A SUMMARY WRITING COURSE FOR LANGUAGE STUDENTS IN A PERSONAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT: PERLE UNICAL MARISA CARIA, LIS CONDE, MICHAEL CRONIN AND STEFANIA FIRETTO UNIVERSITY OF CALABRIA, ITALY

Introduction The aim of this paper is to present a Summary Writing Course in the PerLE Unical Personal Learning Environment. PerLE is an open source, online learning environment, conceived both as a response to a perceptible modern shift in learning paradigms and also to overcome the well-known limitations of Learning Management Systems. This is achieved by extending their use through the employment of more flexible learning systems which enable student-centred engagement in activities characterized by collaboration, interoperability and creativity. Learning today is seeing an ever-increasing employment of e-learning and computer-mediated activity in support of blended learning courses, and there is also a challenging shift towards the use of courses managed exclusively online. Another important aspect is the perceived need to promote non-formal and informal learning as indicated in European Commission recommendations, in a context in which learning is considered a lifelong activity and no longer limited to formal and institutional content and validation requirements. In this paper, we propose a Summary Writing Course conceived primarily as a support element in a specific formal university syllabus. The course has been developed in the PerLE platform exploiting extensive functionalities (LAMS, Moodle) and Web 2.0 tools. Its use is, furthermore,

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constantly updated and enriched by newly developed elements as they become available. It demonstrates the efficacy of a dynamic assembly approach in the creation of e-courses using reusable learning objects. The proposed course activities allow the instructor to introduce the students to a collaborative learning environment in which tasks and activities involve them in an online community promoting “learning by doing”. This student-centred approach enables a shift from passive to active learning which is creative and distributive. The PerLE Unical platform has been designed and created in the institutional context of the campus-based university in southern Italy which hosts it with a view, in a formal learning scenario, to offering students access to courses and course materials as a blended learning support to teaching on courses held in a traditional form in classrooms, lecture halls, laboratories, workshops and seminars. The decision to do so has been taken as a response to the evident change in learning paradigms which has taken place in recent years due to an ever-increasing growth in the use of digital resources and the Internet in learning, both in a more global sense and at the level of universities and schools. The idea was to create an environment which can allow university students to engage in activities which grant them independence in the management and pacing of their learning, making the latter more student-centred, and also enabling forms of exploration of resources, their creation, and their collaborative sharing among peers. Hence the platform makes available an extensive range of tools and social media which are products of the most up-to-date developments available. In line with the concept of community of practice proposed by Ettiene Wenger and others, we consider it important to foster a form of engagement which is linked less to the strict requirements of formal learning and more to the forms of engagement associated with the ways in which adults engage in learning through social practice and involvement in the workplace (see Gray 2004). The platform is therefore to be seen as a melting pot for the expression of a wide range of concerns and interests. To encourage this, a number of blogs have been created related to specific courses and the subjects they deal with, providing students with the opportunity to showcase their work. The platform has also hosted experiments with a web radio run by students and a web TV is currently being developed.

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E-learning and the University Universities are moving increasingly towards the institutional adoption and use of e-learning course content. With the recent rise in popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) relying on open source materials and based to a considerable extent on connectivist principles and the development of the concept of the Learning Ecology as proposed by writers such as George Siemens (2003, 2005), it has now become important for us to re-evaluate our interpretation of what the role of the university is in this fast developing scenario and what it can be in the future in relation to these phenomena. E-learning is now an important element in education and can bring together the inclinations and practices of the modern “digital native” (see below) and the opportunities offered by tools and applications which are fundamental to modern communication. In his re-evaluation of his previous thinking regarding the divide between digital immigrants and digital natives, Prensky (2011) espouses the idea that teachers engage in a new form of relationship with students which sees the former coming to terms with the fact that the new “locus” for knowledge and learning has shifted away from the confines of the traditional classroom to embrace the almost infinite potential of the web and digital content. “Digital wisdom” therefore involves a productive and intelligent use of the massive potential of this universe and it is necessary to study carefully how to approach it and how to exploit it in order to develop critical and creative thinking skills. Therefore, pedagogical strategies must be designed with care and with a constant eye to forms of evaluation and feedback that will teach us better how to use these instruments. These considerations are confirmed by the fact that today there are issues regarding pedagogical approaches that have to contend with conflict with established and traditional paradigms of learning – we need to define anew the roles of institution, teacher and student as we move away from the centrality of the traditional, physically located role of the teacher seen as a single source of dispensation of knowledge and expertise who transmits these through lectures and seminars, distributing paper-based materials or references. Web 2.0 has changed this radically, making an almost infinite amount of materials available across all disciplines. The digital and e-learning paradigm is changing the teacher’s role from that of figure of authority and single source of instruction to that of a guide and facilitator in the path to learning, with the student acquiring a new centrality in terms of decision-making and a new participatory role in terms of collaboration and community.

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It is therefore of great importance that teachers respond to these developments by adapting to new scenarios for course design, and that they engage with the establishment of objectives and content from curricula to course, lesson, topic and activity (Horton 2006: 6) with the concomitant necessity of putting in place valid forms of evaluation and assessment in order to ascertain the efficacy of e-learning content and procedures. It is also necessary to assess the state of those technological instruments which enable e-learning and how they can be employed in an interpretation of learning which can benefit from the use of intelligent digital learning environments which make appropriate use of those elements characteristic of modern communication and social networking, which are by nature “distributive” in a connectivist interpretation of the nature of learning.

The PerLE Platform In the light of these considerations, the PerLE Unical platform has been designed with an initial view to exploiting the advantages offered by digital technology for formal learning so that students can become familiar with this type of environment and make use of course materials made available as a support to their institutional courses. The idea is to encourage them both to make use of the course materials and to engage with the wider environment of the platform, establishing community of practice through the stimulation of participatory involvement, sharing and creativity, extending also towards spheres of non-formal and informal learning. PerLE therefore seeks to offer an environment conducive to such activity in a dynamic open source approach to learning. Figure 1 shows the PerLE icon once a user has accessed the system. It is currently divided into four macro areas: CREATE – STUDY – COLLABORATE – COMMUNICATE. The idea is to encourage the students/users to take control of and manage their own learning and also to communicate and collaborate with others in the process. CREATE offers a series of web tools in support of learning. STUDY offers institutionally created courses and also access to open source courseware from many other institutions and bodies which create and provide such material. COLLABORATE makes available a series of networking tools such as video conferencing and blogs to enable the elimination of distance, while COMMUNICATE allows users to present their work to others promoting exchange and sharing of models and approaches.

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Figure 1

Learning Management Systems and tools in the PerLE platform For the creation and use of institutional courses and materials, access is enabled by the Moodle icon in STUDY. The use of Learning Management systems (LMS) is an important part of PerLE which involves the integrated use of more than one LMS for a number of reasons. LMSs offer a series of advantages for the teacher who is a creator and manager of course materials and courses. They are highly effective for the presentation of Learning Objects (LOs) and allow the teacher/user to easily design and deliver customized LOs and course materials. They enable the creation of instructor-led learning paths and permit the teacher to monitor and judge performance on given tasks and assignments. Scheduled assessments can be carried out to this effect, and in response to this the teacher can adapt, modify or adjust learning objects, tailoring them to perceived needs and learning objectives. LMSs also allow for collaborative action and intervention through the availability and use of forums, blogs and wikis in the context of given courses. They also facilitate efficient ease of communication through announcements, notes, portfolios, documents, multimedia galleries, links, news and assignments. There are, however, a number of considerations that have led the PerLE team to adopt an approach based on the integrated use of more than

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one LMS and this stems from the fact that employment of a single LMS can manifest a number of limitations or disadvantages. LMSs tend to be characterized by their ‘one size fits all’ nature which can limit system responsiveness to learner needs which may not necessarily be satisfied by the instruments available in the ‘package’ available. This is to the detriment of learner-centredness which is so important to the conception driving the creation of PerLE. The answer to this problem lies in two elements. Firstly, it is important to integrate and make available the use of tools which enhance creative freedom of expression and, even in a course context which is instructorled, permit exploration and learner-centred exploration and personal learning. We need spaces for learner expression (blogs, portfolio), for connection with other learners (forums, discussion lists), for dialogue with the teacher/instructor (email, Skype, messaging) as well as spaces to learn in a structured manner (courses, tutorials). Also important in this context is the concept of modularity, here interpreted in terms of creating the possibility for the addition of functions and tools as their usefulness or necessity become apparent. Secondly, we have decided in PerLE to make use of more than one LMS – currently the platform makes use of Moodle but also uses OLAT, created at the University of Zurich, which allows for the creation of course materials and learning objects which can be incorporated. We also employ LAMS for creating sequences of learning activities that can also be incorporated and are currently also using the XERTE open source tools suite (University of Nottingham) for the creation of content and LOs for integration of course materials.

PerLE and blended support for language learning Language teaching in Italian universities tends to suffer from a scarcity of resources and teaching staff in proportion to student numbers which results in overcrowded classrooms and a serious challenge for teachers who are often faced with the impossibility of catering to the needs of individuals who tend to get lost in the crowd. This is particularly unproductive in terms of learners having the opportunity to engage actively in communicative and authentic use of language. Account cannot be taken of mixed abilities, individual aims and learning styles, and this is highly demotivating both for learners and teachers. There is also the important consideration that the number of class hours dedicated to language learning is small, usually on account of timetable obligations for other subjects. Language teachers have developed numerous approaches,

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which are effectively blended in nature, such as the use of authentic materials, the encouragement of self-study, the use of language laboratories and collaborative project work, in an attempt to remedy the disadvantages of the above-outlined scenario. So blended approaches are not new, and today their employment can be enhanced considerably through the use and exploitation of advances in modern technology, especially if we take into account the natural propensity of young people to use such technology as an integral part of the way they live. Language teachers have been using computers as a support to learning for a long time and Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) dates back to the 1960s with initiatives such as the Plato Project at the University of Illinois. A considerable advance arrived with the emergence of behaviourist CALL, thanks to the development of microcomputers in the 1970s, although interaction was limited to the textual and the language learner could only respond to prompts from the computer-tutor, ascertaining merely that their responses were right or wrong. When the personal computer, with its improved functions and graphics, became available on the mass market in the 1970s, there was a boom in the development of software for language learning and it became possible to engage in more varied activities using the PC, such as reading, text reconstruction and language games. The computer, however, remained very much a tutor, dispensing tasks, and activity was not centred on the learner. Communicative CALL approaches, in line with theoretical and methodological developments in language teaching, espoused a number of important principles, seeking to move away from drilled-based instruction to more communicative engagement, with the notion of teaching grammar implicitly rather than explicitly, encouraging learners to produce original language rather than responding to language that was prefabricated and prepared for their consumption. Another important consideration was that the learner should not be judged or evaluated in terms of errors made in the use of language since making errors is part of the language learning process. In the 1990s, Integrated CALL emerged, projecting the horizons of language learning beyond the controlled environment of the classroom. Eventually, embracing the enormous range of possibilities offered by the arrival of the Internet, there emerged a number of types of e-learning. These include Open Schedule Online Courses which offer considerable freedom to the learner. Although they usually include deadlines for completion of work, they exploit the use of mailing lists, email and materials provided online. This is an asynchronous form of learning. Hybrid Distance Learning mixes the synchronous and the asynchronous in

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the sense that learners are expected to meet at specific times in class or, for example, in chat rooms, and deadlines are managed much more flexibly. Computer-based distance learning is much less flexible, since learners have to convene in a specific computer lab or classroom at established times. Also quite rigid in terms of time management, there are Fixed Time Online Courses for which learners are required to log on at specific times. In the light of these developments, blended forms of learning, conceived as a form of technological supplement to face-to-face classroom learning, offers a significant series of advantages which embrace the positive features of engagement, both synchronous and asynchronous. It guarantees a more individual learning experience and offers forms of support which are specific to the single learner. It has the potential, because of the variety of media-driven activities on offer, to respond to different learning styles and tendencies. It offers a space in which to use the target language outside the classroom and allows learners to pace their learning in a more relaxed environment. In Italy, the emergence in recent decades of university language centres (Centri Linguistici di Ateneo) has been an important step forward in centralizing the organizational effort to coordinate the language teaching offer and its relative forms of support. It is our opinion that these centres can benefit significantly from the use, in a blended learning approach, of platforms and learning environments like PerLE which offer students the opportunity to engage with a wide variety of media in support of their language learning, often for specific purposes according to the characteristics of their degree course and its related subjects. The PerLE platform currently hosts numerous courses in various disciplines and the members (language teachers) of the research group which created it are currently engaged in course creation for English for Law, English for Tourism, English for Business Administration, English for Media Education and English for Clinical Pathology. One of our chief concerns in the promotion of this kind of digital courseware in a learning environment is, apart from stimulating engagement for the reasons outlined above, to establish sound pedagogical approaches based on the use of efficacious learning materials (LOs), and to make a digitally wise use of elements such as blogs and forums in support of students so as to respond to their needs by offering teacher-student communication. We also want to stimulate peer-to-peer communication, to take the unique focus off the teacher to an extent sufficient to encourage independence based on student collaboration, and finally to guarantee technical support which is fast and efficient to provide a feeling of comfort and reassurance in the use of the digital environment.

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Summary Writing Course description In recent years, the Web 2.0 has radically changed the way people use information and knowledge, and also the way in which they interact with others using the Internet. This transformation has taken place with the Web 2.0, which features an innovative environment and models which are efficacious for e-learning. It has created a space online, where learning is student-centred, where the user has the opportunity to share his/her learning experiences with the rest of the community, and to learn from organized educational resources. The new horizons that have begun to emerge in the field of online learning offer the opportunity to experiment with the role of learning environments in the network, employing tools that can facilitate both selfstudy and collaboration among students through the use of LOs. As a result, the design and implementation of the Summary Writing Course has been carried out in the PerLE Personal Learning Environment. Placing emphasis on what the web offers in facilitating improvements in the teaching of Languages, the course on "Summary Writing" has as its objective the acquisition and development of knowledge and skills for editing and compiling the "summary" of a text. We have chosen this aspect of writing because knowing how to summarize is useful for the improvement of students’ reading comprehension skills, and because it is an effective way to capture what is most important in a given text. Furthermore, this strategy can be used in any discipline. Being able to summarize long articles or documents and link them together helps the student to consolidate and express the main concepts quickly and accurately. The Summary Writing Course was created on the basis of a blended learning methodology for students at undergraduate level. It is conceived as an integrated supportive resource to traditional classroom teaching exploiting cutting-edge web-based resources. The curriculum structure of the course is subdivided into three modules: Module 1: Writing a Summary, which focuses on defining the concept of a good summary, main idea and topic sentence. Module 2: Paraphrasing and Tips, which includes a series of restructuring activities for syntax and lexis, as well as a list of helpful tips for editing a good summary. Module 3: Let’s Summarize! This section gives students the opportunity to practise their summary writing skills through more

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complex and tangible activities such as summarizing world news from well-known websites. The course also provides a section devoted exclusively to practice exercises on vocabulary and grammar, called the Language Practice Corner. The section dedicated to final assessment, called the “Wrap Up”, is not only the culmination of the course, but also a good example of how a blog can be used for academic purposes. We will further discuss this concept in the next section. The structure design of the course consisted of the creation of reusable learning objects that were organized in the following manner:

Figure 2

The choice of our teaching module structure was based on our need to create a clearly organized and easy-to-follow learning experience. Our desire was to create a course that provided students with a study guide that was intuitive, and that presented the content with increasing degrees of complexity to avoid discouraging participants right from the start. The various activities have been designed using the Moodle platform and LAMS (Learning Activity Management System). Moodle provided us with the administrative functionalities needed to monitor the educational progress of the students. LAMS, on the other hand, provided us with the ability to structure our learning objects in a stream-like manner which made the academic learning path intuitive and explicit (see Figure 3 for further clarification).

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Figure 3

The most important characteristic of the LAMS is that it allows the instructor to introduce the student to an environment of "Collaborative Learning", i.e. environments where tasks are carried out in groups and designed in such a way that the student can feel part of a community where learners develop their papers in a cooperative spirit, and build on their learning through the approach of learning-by-doing. In order to achieve this goal, the course includes a series of communication channels provided by the PerLE platform, and these are readily available so that students may select the channel that they prefer. The objective here is to motivate students to complete an assignment through active and constant collaboration with their peers. In fact, it has been argued that teachers who structure their courses and curriculum in a way that enable students to interact regularly over content not only increase interest among participants, but also promote critical thinking (Thadphoothon 2005). The design of our course aims to exploit this concept right from the start. The welcome section of our course denominated “The Green Zone” includes a forum called “Around the Table” where students have the opportunity to start practising their English skills by introducing themselves to their classmates. In this manner, students start seeing themselves as active participants responsible for the content they introduce to their learning community. Throughout the course, students are gradually introduced to the academic blog, Fatti di PerLE, an instrument created using Wordpress, one of the leading open source resources used for these purposes.

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The Academic Blog: a resource for the promotion of collaborative learning There is much debate and research on the evolution of the web. Initially, it was not a very welcoming environment for the masses: this was not only because it was a new tool and few people had access and the knowledge about how to use it, but also because the process or language used to interact with a page was reserved mainly for programmers and Internet specialists. Web 2.0 is different from the initial concept of the web, now known as Web 1.0, in that it no longer only uses a series of static websites with functions such as e-mail and the use of search engines. Navigation is no longer simply linear and is now more dynamic and interactive. Today, for example, it is relatively easy to create a blog, website, a virtual TV channel or a radio show. Software resources, services and website interfaces are becoming easier to use, thus giving the vast majority of people the opportunity to become virtual content producers. We decided to take full advantage of this opportunity with students. As a result, activities were designed to be implemented through a blog, due to the ease with which students can add content, but above all because it revolutionizes the idea of sharing, communicating and interacting (Manfioletti 2009). A blog is defined as: a website, usually maintained by an individual or an entity, in which the author publishes more or less regularly, as a sort of online diary, expressing thoughts, opinions, reflections, considerations, and more, including where appropriate, other types of electronic material such as graphics or video (ibid.).

The functionality of a blog allows students to write an article (post) where they can express their opinions and ideas in an informal yet structured manner. They are able to exercise their knowledge by actually creating virtual content. At the same time, students may receive immediate feedback from instructors and peers through the comments. The blog was chosen because its interface is user-friendly and creates a collaborative environment where learning is a natural social act in which participants can talk amongst themselves. In this environment, the instructor is merely a guide, both a giver and receiver of information. In order to take advantage of all of these characteristics, the final evaluation of the course includes two parts. The first part is a formal evaluation meant to monitor newly acquired competences through a test designed in Moodle. The second part of the evaluation involves the creation of a final product, The Virtual Newspaper. This activity requires students to

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read an online newspaper such as bbc.com, or the guardian.com, and choose an article that interests them. Students are then required to summarize the chosen article and post their summary on the blog so that others may read and comment on the content of their summary. They are encouraged to use images or videos to make the content of their summary more interesting. See the following images for further illustration.

Figure 4

It is important to mention that the use of a blog does not require instructors to teach students how to use new, complicated technology. In fact, the user-friendly interface of a blog requires students to use technical competences they tend already to possess. The functionality of a blog works exactly like an email or Facebook. The users write content, and once they hit submit, the content is made public and is readily available to their peers, instructors and, in effect, the entire virtual world. The blog is a strong resource for education, yet to be exploited to its full potential in the academic field. This course aims at experimenting with new, innovative tools with the objective of motivating students to succeed in their studies through collaboration and learning-by-doing.

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Conclusions and future research activity Apart from creating course materials like those here presented for the Summary Writing Course, the PerLE research group is engaged in a number of activities aimed at developing the platform to improve the forms of service it offers to users. One important aspect on which work is being carried out for the platform regards learning objects, their creation and reuse, or redeployment. Given that the creation of LOs can be a timeconsuming task, and given that as a result of evaluation and user feedback they may require adaptation or modification, it is important to establish a means for their preservation and metadata referencing. We are therefore currently experimenting with an institutional repository solution for the LOs created by teachers working on producing courses and materials for formal blended use and have chosen Eprints, an open source software package developed at the University of Southampton. Students who use the platform, on the other hand, are encouraged to adopt the collaborative tagging approach known as Folksonomy in an attempt to experiment with a degree of descriptive consensus in the use of LOs. While this approach does not guarantee a stable or fixed classification system in metadata or tagging terms, it is our opinion that personal tag vocabularies, or personomies, can provide useful indications, not least with regard to evaluation and feedback for platform use, in terms of user perception of the materials and learning objects involved. We expect that with developing growth of platform use, a situation will emerge in which broad rather than narrow folksonomies will offer a rich basin of metadata reference which will be a useful indicator of how the platform can adapt to hosting its users and respond to their perceptions. An important aspect of platform use and development is that of evaluation regarding learning behaviour and outcomes, and ease of platform use. In a digital environment in which students are encouraged to engage in self-regulated learning activity which regards both the formal and the informal, it is important to gather data on how they respond to the materials and instruments available. Therefore, both in quantitative and qualitative terms, we are interested in how student learning styles are reflected in their use of specific types of materials on a course which is dynamically assembled and open source, and which offers varied methods of approach in obtaining specific learning goals. So ongoing research is aimed at gauging learner responses to personalized learning and the extent to which these find positive expression in self-assessment for language learning using the platform.

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With a view to longer-term activity on the platform, studies are also currently being carried out at the other end of the spectrum from formal learning, with researchers engaged in the preliminary design of open courses on the model of MOOCs and those produced, for example, by the numerous universities which offer courses through the Coursera educational technology company.

References Gibbons A. 2011. Contexts of instructional design. The Journal of Applied Instructional Design 1/1. Accessed 28 September 2014 from http://www.jaidpub.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/03/GibbonsArticleMa r2011.pdf. Gray B. 2004. Informal learning in an online community of practice. Journal of Distance Education Spring/Printemps 19/1: 20-35. Horton W. 2006. E-Learning by Design. San Francisco: Wiley and Sons. Manfioletti G. 2009. The blog, an academic resource. University of Padova. At http://www.blogdidattici.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ilblog-una-risorsa-per-la-didattica.pdf. Prensky M. 2011. From digital natives to digital wisdom. Accessed 28 September 2014 from http://marcprensky.com/writing/PrenskyIntro_to_From_DN_to_DW.pdf. Palmer S. 2012. Digital Wisdom: Thought Leadership for a Connected World. Stamford, CT: York House Press. Papuzza E. / W. Nanni 2008. Educazione e nuovi media: diritti e responsabilità verso una cittadinanza digitale. Save the Children Italia e Mondadori Education. At http://images.savethechildren.it/IT/f/img_pubblicazioni/img34_b.pdf. Siemens G. 2003. Learning ecology, communities, and networks extending the classroom. Accessed 28 September 2014 from http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/learning_communities.htm. —. 2005. Connectivism: learning as network-creation. At http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/networks.htm. Thadphoothon J. 2005. Promoting critical thinking in language learning through computer-mediated collaborative learning: a preliminary investigation. International Research Journal of Arts and Humanities 37: 63-73. At http://www.canberra.edu.au/researchrepository/file/264d5c23-6a0098fe-f08e-b82a83ebb9e7/1/full_text.pdf.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE LES TICE1 INTRA ET EXTRA-MUROS STIMULANT L’APPRENTISSAGE DES LANGUES ET SAUVEGARDANT L’INTERACTION HUMAINE ISABELLE DOTAN UNIVERSITÉ BAR-ILAN, ISRAËL

Introduction A l’époque où l’on est en contact constant et instantané avec des milliers d’"amis" sur Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc., où l’on parle tant d’information et de communication, la question de la solitude sociale se pose de plus en plus. Les débats sont nombreux et les avis partagés. Notamment, la socio-psychologue Sherry Turkle relève l’ambivalence des TIC (Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication) qui en fin de compte redéfinissent notre perception de la solitude; elle utilise la formule "Seul ensemble" pour décrire la relation humaine version vingt-et-unième siècle (Turkle 2013). La question est d’autant plus pertinente lorsqu’il s’agit de l’enseignement des langues étrangères étant donné qu’une langue est avant tout un outil de communication entre personnes. Dans le contexte actuel, vingt ans après leur introduction dans l’enseignement, les TICE viennent d’une part bouleverser l’enseignement classique, et d’autre part, lui fournissent de nouvelles ressources hautement profitables (Collin / Karsenti 2012 ; Karsenti 2008; Barak / Kogan 2008). Les recherches sur l’utilisation des TIC dans l’enseignement des langues prolifèrent elles aussi: les bases de données de recherche offrent d’innombrables articles sur le sujet et d’après les mots-clés "E-Learning" et "Second Language 1

TICE: Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication dans l’Enseignement ou encore TIC : Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication.

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acquisition" sur la base de données ERIC,2 de l’an 2000 à aujourd’hui, on recense 213 articles: la plupart (83%) traitent d’un outil ou d’une stratégie TICE spécifique et de son efficacité comme par exemple l’utilisation du smartphone en classe (Kiernan / Aizawa 2004 ; Lu 2008), la création d’un blog de classe (Hourigan / Murray 2010; Garcia-Sanchez / Rojas-Lizana 2012) etc. D’autres articles portent sur l’enseignement combinant le cours en présentiel et l’utilisation des TIC c'est-à-dire le BLL (Blended Language Learning) (6,6%), les cours en ligne (4,2%) et autres sujets (4,2%). Notons que très peu d’articles abordent l’interaction et l’impact de la présence humaine dans l’enseignement des langues (2%). On mentionnera cependant les travaux de Gunawardena (1995), Gunawardena et Zittle (1997), Ubon et Kimble (2003), Lobry de Bruyn (2004) sur l’importance de la présence sociale dans l’enseignement des langues qui tentent de démontrer combien cette présence influe sur l’efficacité d’une session d’apprentissage. Pour l’essentiel, ces dernières études suggèrent que le manque de présence sociale peut entraîner une baisse de niveau dans l’apprentissage d’une langue. Chao-Jung Ko (2012) analysant l’impact de la "présence sociale" dans la perception de l’apprenant fait l’observation suivante: The learners’ perception of social presence was highest in the Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) with webcam and headset, and lowest in the CMC with headset only. And they perceived the highest immediacy in the face-to-face environment. The main factors that impacted on the participants’ perception of social presence in these three learning modes were the availability of nonverbal cues, peers’ immediacy, and the feeling of being ‘real’. The other factors were familiarity with their partners (Manstead, Lea & Goh, 2008), the location in which they performed the oral tasks and their perception of distance between each other (intimacy) 3 (Ko 2012:77).

C’est en partie sur ces conclusions que se fonde cet article – qui ne prétend pas présenter une étude statistique supplémentaire mais proposer une réflexion sur la méthodologie et la didactique des langues, ainsi que sur la communication des êtres humains dans le cadre de l’enseignement des langues étrangères à des apprenants adultes en milieu universitaire. Notre objectif est de démontrer que les TIC associées à l’enseignement traditionnel peuvent constituer une formule idéale pour stimuler l’apprentissage des langues tout en sauvegardant l’interaction humaine. A 2 3

Base de données "ERIC" = Education Resources Information Center. C’est nous qui soulignons.

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partir de différentes recherches et sur la base d’expériences personnelles, nous examinerons les points suivants: l’importance fondamentale du cours en présentiel ; les objectifs et l’utilisation des TIC dans l’enseignement des langues intra-muros et extra-muros et l’importance de la plateforme d’apprentissage parallèlement au cours en présentiel. Notre propos considérera les quatre stratégies classiques de l’apprentissage d’une langue, à savoir la compréhension orale et écrite, la production orale et écrite. Enfin, nous examinerons la pertinence des laboratoires de langue aujourd’hui et la valeur des MOOC.4

L’importance du cours en présentiel Comme nous l’avons dit, une langue est avant tout un outil de communication. Mais remarquons d’ores et déjà que si l’enseignement ou l’étude et donc la connaissance d’une langue de façon purement théorique est concevable,5 il en va autrement pour l’enseignement ou l’apprentissage de la langue parlée et vivante. Dans ce second cas, selon la ligne directrice adoptée ici – c’est-à-dire l’interaction dialogique, physique (la gestuelle), dynamique et spontanée entre personnes – nous considérons que le cours traditionnel en présentiel est indispensable; il est le socle de l’enseignement d’une langue avec, en coulisse et extra muros, les devoirs qui font partie intégrante de l’apprentissage. C’est dans cette double perspective intra-muros et extra-muros que nous allons considérer l’utilisation tout aussi indispensable, voire vitale des TIC dans l’enseignement des langues étrangères avec le modèle du FLE comme référence.

Objectifs et utilisations des TICE intra-muros En classe, l’usage des TIC ne doit pas être systématique. Ce n’est pas parce que leur usage fait l’objet d’un engouement qu’il faut en imposer l’utilisation qui dépend principalement du programme et du contenu de la leçon. Le cours en présentiel peut très bien se dérouler sans aucune utilisation des TIC; toutefois leur utilisation en classe exige un équipement de bonne qualité et, si nécessaire, une connexion efficace au réseau Internet. L’étude des structures grammaticales d’une langue vivante ne consiste pas à emmagasiner un savoir, c’est un apprentissage. Pour cette raison, la 4 5

MOOC = Massive Open Online Course. Ce point sera soulevé plus loin.

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stratégie d’apprentissage classique du cours en présentiel reste ce qu’elle a toujours été, même si, à la place d’un tableau traditionnel, le professeur utilise un diaporama ou un TBI: explications à base d’exemples spontanés ou préparés à l’avance selon la situation, des questions et la dynamique de classe. Par ailleurs, dans l’enseignement de toute langue étrangère, l’acquisition de nouveaux mots sollicite continuellement des images, des illustrations et des situations souvent dialogiques dans lesquelles les dialogues sont spontanés ou planifiés d’avance. Davantage que pour l’étude des structures grammaticales, ce processus nécessite des outils issus d’un ouvrage, des objets, des photos, des dialogues, des textes enregistrés ou des vidéo-clips projetés en classe. Les recherches ont déjà démontré que dans le processus d’acquisition du vocabulaire les outils visuels multimédia constituent un atout majeur (Ellis / Beaton 1993 ; Chun / Plass 1996) en particulier les vidéo-clips (Al-Seghayerm 2001). C’est surtout pour l’acquisition de nouveaux mots, locutions et expressions que les TIC sont très utiles et de fait répondent à un double objectif: un objectif didactique puisqu’ils permettent de visualiser une chose ou une situation sans passer par la traduction directe dans la langue de l’apprenant et un objectif organisationnel, dans la mesure où ils captent l’attention des étudiants car l’observation d’une image sur l’écran – image concrétisant le mot ou le sujet en question – crée une situation d’attente positive et tient l’apprenant en éveil (Khalid Al-Seghayer 2001: 202). Il faut veiller à ce que l’introduction de ces images, vidéo-clips ou séquences audio n’entrave pas la fluidité du déroulement du cours et ne brise pas la spontanéité et le dynamisme de la leçon. Ces outils peuvent également servir à instaurer des échanges entre les apprenants dans la langue étudiée. Cependant, parmi les nombreuses ressources dont nous disposons aujourd’hui, il faut savoir choisir les outils de travail c'est-à-dire les appareils, les logiciels et les ressources qu’offre la Toile (Web).

La classe – Mode d’emploi 1. Les appareils Pour retenir l’attention des étudiants en classe, les supports de base sont le tableau, l’ordinateur relié au réseau Internet et le projecteur. Ces outils manipulés par le professeur captent et monopolisent l’attention des étudiants qui n’ont besoin ni d’ordinateur, ni de tablette ou de smartphone. Ces appareils sont réservés au travail individuel et il est même souvent

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conseillé de les interdire en classe même si l’ordinateur est devenu un outil d’écriture courant pour les étudiants en classe.6

2. Les logiciels En plus du tableau, du livre ou du manuel traditionnels, les diaporamas Power Point sont des outils visuels utiles à la présentation en classe d’arguments théoriques comme la récapitulation d’un nouveau point grammatical, l’acquisition de mots de vocabulaire ou d’expressions idiomatiques.7 L’apprentissage des expressions grâce à un diaporama est idéal car il concrétise une situation souvent difficile à décrire, à représenter et à matérialiser en classe. Les diaporamas présentés en cours doivent être préparés et programmés à l’avance. C’est leur moindre désavantage.

3. Les ressource Dans le cours en présentiel, l’utilisation d’Internet s’accompagne souvent de temps d’attente (téléchargement ou autres problèmes techniques) qui brise le rythme du cours et entraine fréquemment une baisse de l’attention. Pour y remédier, l’enseignant peut éventuellement télécharger les images ou les vidéos clips à l’avance mais, dans ce cas encore, c’est la spontanéité qui en pâtit. Quand l’enseignant peut compter sur une connexion Internet fiable, l’utilisation de Google Image et de YouTube s’avère efficaces (Chinnery 2008; Terantino 2011): - Google Image est pratique pour l’acquisition de substantifs concrets afin d’éviter la traduction. Par exemple, le mot "colchique" tapé sur Google Image fait paraitre une série de photos de colchiques. - Les chansons en vidéo-clips de YouTube représentent également un apport audiovisuel de grand intérêt. Se rapportant à l’argument grammatical ou thématique étudié, elles captent l’attention et se présentent à la fois comme un intermède agréable et une approche concrète de la matière en contexte. Par exemple, suite à l’apprentissage de la possession selon la formule "être à + pronom tonique" (ce livre est à moi), puis de l’adjectif possessif (c’est mon livre), la lecture et l’écoute de la chanson "Mon mec à moi" de Patricia Kaas expose aux étudiants le point à l’étude sous diverses formes. Outre à leur caractère didactique, les clips évoquent 6 Notre propre expérience nous montre que les étudiants de cours de langue mettent vite de côté leur ordinateur dès qu’ils sont "captivés" par la leçon. 7 Exemple de visuel pour l’apprentissage des expressions : "Il me casse les pieds" Site de TV5 Monde) http://www.tv5.org/TV5Site/publication/galerie-236-13Casser_les_pieds_de_quelqu_un_ennuyer_importuner_quelqu_un.htm.

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une atmosphère, des symboles et des sons inhérents à la culture de la langue étudiée. Il existe aujourd’hui de nombreux clips pouvant également servir d’exercice de repérage du sens des mots et ensuite de la reconstitution d’un texte simple. Par exemple: suite à l’apprentissage de trois verbes (fleurir, se fendre, s’étirer), les étudiants sont appelés à repérer dans un clip de la chanson populaire Colchiques dans les prés,8 le sujet et le complément de lieu des trois verbes (Répondre aux questions : Qu’est-ce qui "fleurit / se fend / s’étire" et où ?). Enfin, ils reconstituent les phrases de la chanson puis les comparent avec le texte original.9 Ce genre d’activité (apprentissage de nouveaux mots et reconstitution d’un texte (involvement load) est des plus efficaces pour l’acquisition et la mémorisation du vocabulaire (Hulstijn / Laufer 2001). Les clips de YouTube peuvent également servir d’explications audiovisuelles pour l’apprentissage de locutions difficiles à illustrer en classe comme, par exemple, les prépositions de lieu.10 A l’occasion, on utilisera certains sites Internet spécifiquement adaptés à la matière enseignée dans le but de visualiser et d’écouter une page d’exercices communs à la classe. C’est un bon outil de dynamique de groupe : "Qui sera le premier à donner la réponse ?".11 Le grand atout de Google, YouTube et d’autres sites choisis est de favoriser également l’échange entre les étudiants durant et en dehors des cours : par la découverte et le partage d’autres clips12 s’établissent des contacts animés sur le sujet en cours d’apprentissage. De plus, YouTube peut amener les étudiants à produire leurs propres clips. Cet outil serait d’ailleurs un stimulant d’apprentissage avantageux (Prensky 2009).13 Que

8

Colchiques dans les prés sur You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC72axh86eg. 9 Transcription du texte: Colchiques dans les prés / fleurissent, fleurissent / colchiques dans les prés / c’est la fin de l’été. 10 Exemple: clip de présentation des prépositions de lieu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZrgoZBliaM. 11 Exercice commun à la classe pour la préparation de l’étude des pronoms compléments directs ou indirects: http://www.lepointdufle.net/ressources_fle/identifier_cod.htm#.UY9OjrWnwQM. 12 Le clip de la chanson Femme libérée de Cookie Dingler http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAQRWmAcmW4 envoyée par l’un et la découverte du clip de la parodie de la chanson Retraité libéré par l’autre http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1s_vj4Bcn0. 13 Prensky Marc, Make those You Tubes, Marc Prensky Practical and Visionary 2009 : http://marcprensky.com/articles-in-publications/.

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ces ressources mènent à la pratique de la langue apprise de façon vivante, n’est-ce pas là le but ultime d’un cours de langue ?

Objectifs et utilisation des TICE extra-muros Sans écarter obligatoirement la notion traditionnelle de "devoir", c’est extra-muros que les TICE peuvent être exploitées au maximum pour pratiquement toutes les stratégies d’apprentissage allant de la compréhension écrite et/ou orale à la production écrite et/ou orale. Cette dernière stratégie de production de l’étudiant extra-muros reste cependant problématique puisque l’ordinateur n’est pas [encore] en mesure de contrôler la production libre d’un étudiant; ce point sera abordé plus loin. L’emploi des TICE dans ce moment de l’apprentissage joint l’utile à l’agréable et donc peut fortement motiver et encourager les étudiants à affronter les devoirs souvent considérés comme un fardeau. Extra-muros, l’éventail des ressources s’élargit en ce qui concerne le choix des appareils (l’ordinateur personnel, le smartphone ou la tablette), des logiciels et des ressources informatives (sites Internet); il y en a tant de nos jours qu’il faut savoir les choisir et c’est à nouveau sur ce point que le rôle du professeur est crucial puisqu’il lui appartient de guider l’étudiant dans cette multitude de ressources avec l’aide de deux outils importants: le courriel et la plateforme d’apprentissage qui deviennent le fil conducteur du cours extra-muros. En revanche, Facebook ou Twitter, ouverts tous azimuts et ne permettant pas une concentration optimale chez l’étudiant, devraient être mis de côté.

Les TICE comme devoirs: mode d’emploi 1. Le courriel Le courriel permet un lien direct et rapide avec les étudiants. Commun à la classe ou individuel, il sert à annoncer, rappeler, envoyer des fichiers ou des hyperliens se rapportant directement aux sujets étudiés en cours.14 Il incite l’étudiant à travailler sans toutefois le harceler. Grâce aux nouveaux logiciels de courrier électronique comme Gmail ou Outlook, il est facile d’organiser des "étiquettes" selon les sujets étudiés, ce qui 14

Exemple de courriel (niveau débutant): "Bonjour,/ Ecoutez le verbe DEVOIR et répétez http://www.lepointdufle.net/ressources_fle/conjugaison_present.htm Maintenant faites l'exercice http://www.lepointdufle.net/ressources_fle/present_devoir.htm / Au revoir".

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permet à l’enseignant de réutiliser des courriels d’année en année et éventuellement les mettre à jour. Le courriel sert également d’outil à la production écrite entre le professeur et les étudiants de tous niveaux, l’humour y est le bienvenu et souvent encourage les étudiants à écrire.15 Il est intéressant de noter que les étudiants demandent à être sollicités par courriel plutôt que de se rendre sur la plateforme d’apprentissage;16 bien qu’incontournable et indispensable, celle-ci exige des étudiants de s’y rendre spécifiquement alors que le courriel est plus disponible mais aussi plus limité.

2. La plateforme d’apprentissage La plateforme d’apprentissage est l’accompagnateur direct du cours en présentiel, leçon après leçon, en parallèle et en supplément à ce qui a été 15 L’échange entre étudiants par courriel est souvent parsemé d’erreurs et de fautes d’orthographe mais ici l’accent est mis sur l’importance de l’échange. Exemple: -Cheres Isabelle et des etudiants, Je voudrais vous mentionner que aujourd'hui est la fete de Saint Patrick! Vous certainement savez que il faut chanter, etre joyeux et boire beaucoup de biere! Alors, je vous invite a la fete a notre pub local ce soir! J'espere vous voir pour feter ensemble. A bientot, S. -Chère S., Je vous remercie chaleureusement pour votre invitation. Je crois que vous avez déjà bu beaucoup de bière car vous n'avez pas donné les détails: A quelle heure ? Et où est votre pub local ? Merci pour votre réponse rapide (car je dois arriver bientôt ! Il est déjà 20 heures ! Isabelle -Chere Isabelle Oh! Je suis tres desolee! Vous savez, la biere... Cette fete est tres populaire .Le pub est a le centre de Haifa de face "Greg". La fete a commence a 1930h, mais je vous attends pour la prochaine biere! S. -Chers amis, Je voudrais vous inviter a mon fête d'anniversaire 40. La fête será célébrée à Paris pendant 7 jours. Mon invitation comprend le vol à Paris, l'hébergement à l'hôtel et un tour dans la ville et ses environs proches. Il n'y a qu'une seule condition que je voudrai vous demander: merci de parler seulement français pendant le voyage. Merci de me confirmer votre participation dès que possible. Votre amie, F. -Chers amis, Je suis tout à fait épate vos lettres. Je voudrais vous recommandé deux sorties. La première est l'exposition sur les constructions du roi Hérode au musée d'Israël. La deuxième est la projection du film 'Une vie meilleure' a l'occasion du festival de la semaine film français a la cinémathèque de Jérusalem. C'est un film Canadien. C'est très difficile d'écrire en français, n'est ce pas? 16 Selon notre expérience personnelle.

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étudié en classe. De nos jours, l’une des plateformes les plus répandues et plus faciles à manipuler est Moodle et c’est celle qui servira de support à notre propos. Elle permet d’exploiter les TICE sous toutes leurs formes et, là encore, le rôle du professeur est de piloter l’étudiant à distance dans son travail individuel extra-muros. Pour ce faire, le professeur crée un cours en ligne directement associé à son cours en présentiel et recyclable d’un cours à l’autre et d’année en année. Pour que la plateforme d’apprentissage soit la plus efficace possible, voici quelques réflexions concernant la "construction du cours" sur Moodle (avec exemples en annotation): -

-

17

Afficher la matière au rythme et en parallèle à la matière étudiée en classe : après chaque leçon, l’enseignant ‘ouvre’ les diverses activités. Avoir soin de couvrir un maximum de catégories d’apprentissage possible pour chaque cours: acquisition lexicale (outils auditifs, visuels avec transcriptions et mots croisés),17 exercices de grammaire gradués (selon les critères proposés plus loin), compréhension écrite et orale18 et enfin, la production écrite. Comme nous l’avons noté auparavant, la seule chose encore impraticable sur la plateforme d’apprentissage est la plus importante: la production orale. L’étudiant peut répéter des phrases, créer des monologues mais ne peut mener une conversation vivante et contrôlée. Cela exigerait que le professeur soit en ligne, disponible à tout instant pour les étudiants. C’est, en particulier, pour remédier à cette inconvénient que le cours en présentiel reste indispensable dans l’enseignement des langues. La plateforme ne crée pas des contacts directs, vivants et spontanés entre l’enseignant et l’apprenant ou entre les apprenants.

Acquisition lexicale: http://www.languageguide.org/french/vocabulary/house/ ou encore pour la construction de mots croisés http://www.eclipsecrossword.com/. 18 Compréhension orale pour débutants: http://www.lepointdufle.net/ressources_fle/interrogation3.htm#.UY-Bz7WnwQM http://www.lepointdufle.net/apprendre_a_lire/fiche_d_identite4.htm#.UYB6LWnwQM. - Compréhension écrite et orale de textes http://www.languageguide.org/french/readings/br/guillotine/ et pour étudiants hébréophones: https://oraprdnt.uqtr.uquebec.ca/pls/public/gscw030?owa_no_site=1869&owa_no_ fiche=21.

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Classement des exercices de grammaire selon le sujet et les stratégies: a. Définir le sujet à pratiquer; b. Graduer les exercices selon le niveau de difficulté tout en diversifiant les stratégies d’apprentissage (voir exemples19); c. Choisir les meilleurs exercices et, après vérification d’adaptation au niveau, les afficher sur la plateforme; d. Créer une ‘boîte à outils’: en plus des stratégies d’apprentissage et des exercices, la plateforme est le lieu virtuel idéal pour afficher et télécharger des fichiers et comptes rendus des leçons: diaporamas exposés durant les cours, comptes rendus grammaticaux, video-clips vus en classe, sites divers comme celui de conjugaisons des verbes, le Bescherelle en ligne,20 liste de participes passés irréguliers, tableau des pronoms personnels et autres rappels théoriques. Mais aussi – bien que facultatif et pour le plaisir de l’étudiant – des clips de chansons à voir ou à revoir et autres sites de culture française selon le sujet et le niveau. Pour les professeurs de français, nous nous permettons de recommander les sites Le point du FLE, Apprendre le français avec TV5 Monde, Bonjour de France, etc.21

Les laboratoires de langues à l’ère des TICE Compte tenu de l’accessibilité, de la facilité de manipulation et de l’efficacité des plateformes d’apprentissage, les laboratoires de langues ont-ils encore leur raison d’être? Dans la démarche que nous tentons de suivre afin de sauvegarder un contact vivant et dynamique lors du cours de 19 Exemple avec les pronoms personnels CO Directs et CO Indirects au présent : - Reconnaissance du complément direct ou indirect dans une phrase: Julien regarde le paysage – Nous parlons à nos enfants - Utilisation du pronom dans la phrase construite : Julien …le…. regarde. - Construction de phrase affirmative ou négative par écrit avec le pronom: Est-ce que Julien regarde le paysage ? Il le regarde / il ne le regarde pas. Repérage auditif du CD ou CI dans une phrase et construction de la réponse avec le pronom: Il parle à Sylvie tous les jours ? Oui, il lui parle. - Exercices ludiques et/ou chansons relatives aux sujets étudiés. 20 Bescherelle en ligne http://www.bescherelle.com/conjugueur.php. 21 Pour les professeurs de français, les excellents portails: -Le point du FLE http://www.lepointdufle.net/, -TV5 Monde apprendre le français http://apprendre.tv5monde.com/ -Bonjour de France http://www.bonjourdefrance.com/

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langue, le fait que des étudiants soient installés un écouteur aux oreilles, derrière un écran, parfois même dans des box individuels ne convient pas. Les laboratoires étaient utiles en tant qu’accompagnement du cours traditionnels quand la technologie ne permettait pas le travail à distance. Aujourd’hui, il semble désuet, voire inutile, de fréquenter un laboratoire de langues alors que toutes les stratégies d’apprentissage à distance sont disponibles par le biais de la plateforme d’apprentissage sur laquelle l’enseignant peut également suivre le travail des étudiants.

Les cours de langue à distance Il existe aujourd’hui diverses formes de cours de langue en ligne: des cours individuels par Skype, des classes en visioconférence ou encore des cours en ligne enregistrés à l’avance. -

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Skype permet la communication orale et écrite vivante et in situ; on peut également transmettre des hyperliens ou des documents. Le problème est souvent d’ordre technique lorsque la qualité de la communication n’est pas satisfaisante, mais si tout fonctionne bien, pourquoi pas? Ce mode d’enseignement est de plus en plus plébiscité pour les cours particuliers. Comme Skype, la visioconférence permet également la communication professeur-étudiants même si celle-ci est quelque peu affaiblie par l’éloignement physique; cependant, si le contact réciproque visuel, auditif et humain est maintenu, elle est peut-être la forme de cours virtuel la plus proche du cours en présentiel. Les cours en ligne enregistrés d’avance par le professeur et accompagnés de diaporamas est inconcevable dans l’enseignement d’une langue vivante si l’on considère que le seul mode de communication possible passe par l’écrit (texto ou courriel). Cependant, si l’on considère l’apprentissage d’une langue de façon purement théorique avec pour objectif la compréhension et de traduction de textes, la chose est envisageable. Dans ce cas, il ne s’agit plus de cours mais de ‘conférences’; il n’y a pas de dialogue mais un ‘transfert de savoir’. Ce genre de cours en présentiel est courant pour les chercheurs ou les futurs traducteurs dans certaines universités. Cela a des avantages pratiques: l’étudiant ne doit pas se déplacer, il étudie à son rythme, peut réécouter les conférences autant qu’il le désire et communiquer par écrit avec son professeur.

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Pour les universités, c’est très avantageux sur le plan financier.22 Il est vrai que le contact vivant et humain est absent mais est-il absolument nécessaire dans ce genre d’apprentissage? Le contact humain dans une classe contenant une centaine d’étudiants est-il meilleur?

Bilan et conclusions Même si les débats actuels mettent encore en évidence l’ambivalence et la problématique de l’utilisation des TIC dans l’enseignement (Barak / Kogan 2008; Uschi 2005), il semblerait qu’elles aient un impact très positif dans l’enseignement en général et l’enseignement des langues étrangères en particulier:23 -

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Elles attirent et passionnent les étudiants et influencent positivement leur motivation à l’étude. De par leur caractère ludique, les TICE servent à capter et à retenir l’attention des étudiants en classe, encourageant leur participation active. Les nombreux supports visuels qu’offrent les TIC améliorent le processus de mémorisation à long terme. L’utilisation d’images, de clips et d’animations peut améliorer et encourager la compréhension de la langue étudiée sans qu’il y ait besoin d’avoir recours à la traduction.

D’une part, dans le cours en présentiel, les TICE représentent "une valeur ajoutée à la situation d’enseignement-apprentissage: motivation accrue des élèves; ressources pédagogiques plus riches et diversifiées; meilleure gestion de l’enseignement" (Collin / Karsenti 2012: 70; Jaen 2009). Elles servent donc d’accompagnement motivant, enrichissant et plaisant aux échanges entre professeur et étudiants ainsi qu’entre étudiants. Mais nous pensons que l’utilisation des TICE dans le cours en présentiel ne doit être ni systématique ni abusive car malgré leurs atouts, les TICE n’encouragent pas toujours le dialogue vivant; l’utilisation des TICE en production orale est plus efficace en interaction sociale réelle (Chao-Jung Ko 2012). Or, il n’existe à ce jour aucune forme de TICE en mesure de 22

Deux cents étudiants dans un cours en ligne pour une cinquantaine intra-muros (Isabelle Dotan, Université de Haïfa, 2012). 23 Les points relevés ci-dessous sont basés sur notre expérience personnelle et le livre T. Karsenti et S. Collin 2013.

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remplacer la présence sociale et le dialogue vivant que permet le cours en présentiel. D’autre part, les TICE offrent une panoplie d’atouts concernant le travail extra-muros; en parallèle au cours en présentiel, elles se révèlent être un véritable stimulant à l’étude individuelle par le biais du courriel et de la plateforme d’apprentissage. Cette dernière centralise le matériel étudié lors des leçons, dans l’ordre d’apprentissage et à long terme; les activités sont ouvertes aux étudiants durant tout le processus d’apprentissage et représentent une aide importante avant l’examen. Pour le professeur, la plateforme permet de suivre le travail des étudiants et de prendre en compte leur activité dans l’appréciation finale du cours. Du point de vue de l’interaction, il y aurait dans les TICE un véritable potentiel de développement des relations humaines à distance. Dans son article Traditional vs. Virtual learning: does it make a difference? Maria Moreno Jaen montre que le courriel, les forums de discussion en ligne permettent un rapprochement et une meilleure rétroaction (feedback) entre les protagonistes professeur-élève ou élève-élève (Jaen 2009: 70) et que les étudiants sont prêts à investir plus de temps dans les travaux basés sur les ressources des TICE (ibid.). Cette même recherche démontre et met également l’accent sur l’importance de la présence active du professeur dans toute interaction à distance (ibid.: 70-73). Quand les TICE sont utilisées intra-muros ou extra-muros, sans ‘guide’, elles perdent vite leur efficacité; c’est là que réside l’importance suprême du professeur en classe ou à distance. Il reste le personnage clé de l’enseignement d’une langue et cela exige non seulement de l’intelligence, du savoir, de la créativité, de la dextérité technique mais aussi du dévouement et une vocation que les TICE ne peuvent remplacer. C’est un bon vieux principe qui nous vient l’Antiquité et qui reste immuable au vingt-et-unième siècle.

Références Barak M. / A. Kogen 2008. Students’ Dichotomic Perceptions of the Use of ICT in Teaching and Learning, Conference Proceedings of Ch@is Research Center for the Integration of Technology in Education, Published in Hebrew by the Open University Raanana, Israel: 29-35. Chinnery G.M. 2008, On the net; you’ve got some GALL, GoogleAssisted Language Learning. Language Learning and Technology 12/1: 3-11. Chun D.M. / J.L. Plass 1996. Effects of multimedia annotations on vocabulary acquisition. The Modern Language Journal 80/2: 183-198.

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Collin S. / T. Karsenti 2012. Les TIC en éducation: ni panacée, ni supercherie. Revue Québec Français 166: 70-71. Ellis N. / A. Beaton 1993. Factors affecting the learning of foreign language vocabulary: imagery keyword mediators and phonological short-term memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 46/3: 533-558. Felix U. 2005. E-learning pedagogy in the Third Millennium: the need for combining social and cognitive constructivist approaches. ReCALL 17: 85-100. Garcia-Sanchez S. / S. Rojas-Lizana 2012. Bridging the language and cultural gaps: the use of blogs. Technology, Pedagogy and Education 21/3: 361-381. Gunawardena C.N. 1995. Social presence theory and implications for interaction and collaborative learning in computer conferences. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications 1/2-3: 147– 166. Gunawardena C.N. / F.J. Zittle 1997. Social presence as a predictor of satisfaction within a computer-mediated conferencing environment. American Journal of Distance Education 11/3: 8–26. Hourigan T. / L. Murray 2010. Using blogs to help language students to develop reflective learning strategies: towards a pedagogical framework. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology 26/2: 209-225. Hulstijn J.H. / B. Laufer 2001. Some empirical evidence for the involvement load hypothesis in vocabulary acquisition. Language Learning 51/3: 539-558. Karsenti T. 2008. Intégration pédagogique des TIC, Colloque PraTIC MITIC 2008, Genève. URL: http://tecfa.unige.ch/pratic/2008/conference.php. Karsenti T. / S. Collin 2013. TIC, technologies émergentes et Web 2.0: Quels impacts en éducation? Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec. Khalid Al-Seghayer 2001. The effect of multimedia annotation modes on L2 vocabulary acquisition: a comparative study. Language & Learning Technology 5/1: 202-232. Kiernan P.J. / K. Aizawa 2004. Cell phones in task based learning – are cell phones useful language learning tools? ReCALL 16/1: 71-84. Ko C-J. 2012. A case study of language learners' social presence in synchronous CMC. ReCALL 24/1: 66-84.

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Lobry de Bruyn L. 2004. Monitoring online communication: can the development of convergence and social presence indicate an interactive learning environment? Distance Education 25/1: 67–81. Lu M. 2008. Effectiveness of vocabulary learning via mobile phone. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 24/6: 515-525. Moreno J.M. 2009. Traditional vs. virtual learning: does it make a difference? Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics 35: 63-79. Terantino J.M. 2011. Emerging technologies: YouTube for foreign languages: you have to see this video. Language Learning and Technology 15/1: 10-16. Turkle S. 2013. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Ubon N.A. / C. Kimble 2003. Supporting the creation of social presence in online learning communities using asynchronous text-based CMC. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Technology in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, July 2003, Heidelberg, Germany: 295–300.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO MOBILE GENERATION E MOBILE LEARNING: ALCUNI PROGETTI IN MOLISE GIULIANA FIORENTINO UNIVERSITY OF MOLISE, ITALY

Mobile generation (generazione always on) Mobile generation è la generazione dei nativi digitali (Prenski 2001a, 2001b), la generazione sempre connessa (Baron 2008) che prima con i pc, e ora con gli smartphone, vive sempre collegata alla sua rete di amicizie reali o virtuali, intenta ad intrecciare continui scambi e a vivere online in una sorta di mondo parallelo al mondo in cui è calata realmente. Per questa generazione, che preferisce scrivere (texting) invece di telefonare (Thurlow 2003 ma anche Crystal 2008), sono stati coniati termini, come appunto textese (l’attività di inviare messaggi via sms) o sexting (il flirtare mediante invio di sms) o anche espressioni come texting while driving (inviare messaggini di testo mentre si è alla guida): neologismi che evidenziano come all’uso dei nuovi media mobili sia comunemente associato un inevitabile impatto sociale (normalmente valutato negativamente). Ed infatti l’abitudine ad essere sempre connessi mediante il telefono cellulare è considerato un comportamento che desta preoccupazione: psicologi, genitori, educatori e giornalisti (Goodstein 2007) si interrogano e si lamentano spesso dei rischi sociali o cognitivi che questa pratica starebbe determinando nelle generazioni di adolescenti e giovani (persino rispetto ai disturbi del sonno). Aldilà di quale sia la posizione che assumiamo rispetto a questi temi, peraltro talvolta esagerati dalla stampa (cfr. Thurlow 2006 e Fiorentino in stampa) in questa sede mi limito ad osservare in che modo le tecnologie ‘portatili’ (mobile technologies) possono essere messe a disposizione della metodologia didattica, in particolare per quanto concerne l’apprendimento linguistico. A questo scopo presento e commento due progetti, entrambi

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realizzati a cura del mio ateneo con la collaborazione del centro linguistico, e prima avanzerò qualche breve riflessione su tecnologie mobili e didattica.

M(obile)-learning: breve storia, definizioni e risorse Il mobile-learning nasce come un segmento dell’e-learning; infatti inizialmente con l’espressione m(obile)-learning ci si riferiva semplicemente al fatto di utilizzare strumenti portatili per l’accesso a contenuti, attività e informazioni della formazione a distanza. Si veda la definizione di Ally (2009) condivisa anche da Ali e Irvine (2009), citata da Pollara e Broussard (2011: 1644): “the process of using a mobile device to access and study learning materials, to communicate with fellow students, instructors or institution.” Successivamente si è passati a focalizzare l’attenzione sul fatto che l’apprendimento che viene mediato da una tecnologia mobile o portatile (telefono cellulare di seconda generazione del tipo smartphone, lettore mp3, computer palmare, tablet) diventa esso stesso ‘portatile’, cioè non avviene in un tempo vincolato o in un luogo fisso e tipicamente deputato all’apprendimento (come in genere avviene in molti se non tutti gli apprendimenti formali), ma è potenzialmente del tutto svincolato da condizionamenti spaziali e temporali.1 Ma il vero e importante cambiamento nella definizione del m-learning consiste, a mio parere, in quanto emerge via via nelle sperimentazioni e nella pratica didattica e cioè si può parlare propriamente di un apprendimento mobile se, utilizzando una tecnologia del tipo mobile, anche le attività di apprendimento sono cambiate e lo strumento non è più il medium per accedere a contenuti statici depositati su una piattaforma di apprendimento, ma diventa lo strumento di creazione di conoscenze e di contenuti di apprendimento impensabili e irraggiungibili con tecnologie diverse da quelle mobili. Secondo gli studi un fattore che giustifica e spiega il successo di questo tipo di didattica è il fatto che essa rispecchia ed è coerente con lo stile di vita ormai diffuso tra gli apprendenti, soprattutto, ma non solo, giovani: “providing anytime, anywhere learning which is consistent with learners’

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Come vedremo in seguito, aldilà delle definizioni, un apprendimento mobile programmato da un docente e inserito in un curricolo di apprendimento formale finisce comunque coll’avere una sua pianificazione, se non altro in relazione a come e a quando usare la tecnologia.

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lifestyles” (Keith Duckitt Head of ICT, Learning and Skills Council, UK citato in Attewell / Savill-Smith 2004: Foreword). Esistono già alcune risorse dedicate esclusivamente al Mobile Learning come l’International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation, l’International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies e l’International Journal of Mobile and Blended Learning (IJMBL), così come esiste l’associazione internazionale del m-learning (International Association For Mobile Learning IAMlLearn2) e molte conferenze internazionali dedicate a questo segmento della formazione. La letteratura sul m-learning, sviluppata dal 2000 in poi, sta subendo un progressivo incremento. Le prospettive sia teoriche sia applicative sono molteplici: sono ovviamente molti già gli studi che tracciano bilanci o che recensiscono progetti già sviluppati, che analizzano i tipi di attività meglio supportati dalla tecnologia mobile (Naismith et al. 2004), o che analizzano la percezione che gli studenti hanno dell’uso didattico delle tecnologie mobile (Pollara / Broussard 2011).

Insegnare con tecnologie mobili Lo sviluppo delle tecnologie digitali portatili è stato così intenso e rapido da far definire mobile age il momento storico che stiamo vivendo. Nonostante la diffusione capillare delle tecnologie mobili e l’entusiasmo che questo tipo di apprendimento sembra riscuotere tra i ricercatori e gli utenti resta comunque fondamentale come studiosi poter rispondere a una domanda cruciale, e cioè se: the use of mobile technologies in the hands of young adults (aged 16–24) might engage them in learning activities, start to change their attitudes to learning and contribute towards improving their literacy, numeracy and life chances (Attewell / Savill-Smith 2004: 3).

I risultati finora attributi all’introduzione delle tecnologie mobili riguardano i seguenti aspetti: a) il miglioramento della comunicazione (le tecnologie usate per scambiare informazioni, notizie, contatti, materiali didattici sia tra docente e allievi sia tra allievi); b) l’agevolazione dell’instaurarsi di una cultura della partecipazione; c) l’aumento della motivazione nell’apprendimento;

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http://www.iamlearn.org/.

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d) la promozione di un apprendimento interattivo che sviluppa le abilità cognitive e facilita il controllo del processo di apprendimento. In questo articolo cerco di rispondere alla domanda di Attewell e SavillSmith presentando e discutendo due sperimentazioni che riguardano l’uso del telefono cellulare per scopi didattici nell’ambito dell’apprendimento linguistico. Prima di entrare nel vivo della discussione avanzerò qualche altra breve considerazione in merito all’introduzione delle tecnologie mobili nella didattica. L’introduzione delle tecnologie mobili nella didattica – come ho già chiarito anche altrove (Fiorentino / Cacchione 2011; Fiorentino in stampa; Fiorentino / Cacchione in stampa) – può avvenire in almeno due modi, in parte divergenti. C’è un uso ingenuo e banale delle tecnologie che le considera alla fin fine quasi un giocattolo attraente da mettere nelle mani degli apprendenti senza cambiare però particolarmente la visione del processo di apprendimento e senza modificare radicalmente il tipo di attività didattiche da realizzare. Si tratta quasi solo di un trasferimento di attività e approcci tradizionali su supporti nuovi. C’è invece un uso consapevole e critico dei media mobili che porta a sperimentare nuove metodologie e attività didattiche grazie all’uso di tecnologie diverse da quelle tradizionali e particolarmente adatte alla condivisione e alla costruzione collettiva di contenuti e conoscenze: si pensi alla possibilità di diffusione e condivisione resa possibile dai social network o alla possibilità di creazione di materiali multimediali messa alla portata di tutti dagli smartphone in particolare. L’equivoco in cui talvolta si cade è che basti usare le tecnologie mobili per poter parlare di innovazione didattica: niente di più erroneo. Un altro equivoco che va chiarito è che il solo utilizzo ‘sociale’ delle tecnologie, cioè come (mero) supporto all’attività didattica, non fa di un corso o di un progetto didattico automaticamente un progetto di mlearning. Invece affinché si possa parlare di un apprendimento mobile occorre che si sia di fronte a un utilizzo mirato delle tecnologie e finalizzato al raggiungimento di uno o più obiettivi formativi specifici. In sintesi una volta decisa la propria posizione rispetto alle tecnologie ‘mobili’ sarà poi opportuno che ciascun educatore o ricercatore che si appresti a usarle sappia valutare e definire l’efficacia in campo educativo e i risultati specifici che la loro introduzione nella didattica comporta (una rassegna di studi in questo senso è già sintetizzata nell’articolo di Pollara e Broussard 2011).

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Progetto SIMOLA (SItuated MObile LAnguage learning) Il progetto SIMOLA mira a sfruttare le potenzialità tecnologiche del telefono cellulare per aumentare le conoscenze lessicali in una lingua straniera e per potenziare le abilità metalinguistiche degli apprendenti. Si tratta dunque di un progetto che usa le tecnologie per ottenere delle ricadute specifiche in termini di apprendimento linguistico. Il progetto SIMOLA (finanziato nell’ambito del programma LLP) è stato sviluppato in ambito europeo e indirizzato a due tipi di apprendenti, studenti della mobilità europea (Erasmus) e migranti adulti (Grundtvig). Il progetto fa propria l’idea secondo cui l’apprendimento ‘situato’ in comunità di pratiche sia più efficace dell’apprendimento limitato al solo contesto formale (Brown et al. 1989; Lave / Wenger 1991) e secondo cui il contesto di attività spontanee focalizzate sulla lingua che si svolgono nel paese della lingua target costituisca la migliore comunità di pratica possibile per acquisire la lingua e la cultura di un paese. Nell’ambito del progetto il coordinatore ha sviluppato un software collaborativo (cioè una app) per telefoni cellulari chiamato LingoBee che consente di catturare e condividere item di interesse linguistico e culturale. Le entrate create dagli utenti (user generated content) confluiscono in un repository organizzato come un lessico (archivio consultabile anche sul web; SIMOLA 2012). Le entrate lessicali possono essere accompagnate da file multimediali (immagini, video, file audio). Il sito web supporta anche servizi per raccogliere, modificare e condividere i contenuti di lingua e di cultura incontrati nella vita quotidiana, quindi non solo offre una piattaforma per l’apprendimento della lingua in situ ma supporta le comunità di apprendenti mediante la creazione di un social network con profili utente, gruppi di utenti, valutazione dei contenuti altrui e altre funzionalità che rendono l’apprendimento linguistico più collaborativo e aiutano a superare l’isolamento nel paese straniero. Il gruppo di ricerca italiano ha realizzato la sperimentazione del software LingoBee con studenti Erasmus divisi in due gruppi che hanno lavorato nei due semestri (in tutto circa 20 studenti: il loro numero è stato determinato dalla disponibilità dei telefoni). Gli studenti più attivi e interessati al progetto sono stati spesso anche quelli più coinvolti e attenti durante l’apprendimento formale della lingua, cioè in classe e nell’interazione con la docente. Sperimentazione e divulgazione dei risultati hanno seguito un protocollo messo a punto all’interno del gruppo di ricerca internazionale. Il reclutamento è avvenuto su base ‘volontaria’; le attività della sperimentazione non sono state inserite nel corso formale di lingua

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italiana; gli studenti erano tutti del livello A2, con familiarità con le tecnologie digitali. Il gruppo che ha lavorato nel primo semestre era costituito da una prevalenza di ispanofoni e nel complesso ha fatto registrare risultati meno brillanti. Il secondo gruppo era misto (studenti turchi, polacchi, spagnoli e un portoghese) e nel complesso più motivato all’apprendimento dell’italiano. Il primo gruppo non è stato addestrato all’uso della app LingoBee e ha via via ridotto il suo coinvolgimento nel progetto. Col secondo gruppo sono stati creati dei ponti tra la didattica formale della lingua (il corso di italiano L2 di 40 ore) e l’apprendimento informale (vale a dire l’uso di LingoBee). Infatti questo secondo gruppo ha usufruito: a) di un gruppo creato sul social network Facebook per supportare il corso formale, ma anche per supportare le attività della sperimentazione; b) di varie sessioni di introduzione a LingoBee incorporate nel corso formale in modo da attenuare l’eccessiva autonomia degli studenti che era stata realizzata col primo gruppo. Le innovazioni sono scaturite dalla valutazione dello scarso coinvolgimento e della scarsa produzione di entrate lessicali da parte del primo gruppo. Il cambiamento operato ha dato qualche frutto. La scelta di creare un ponte tra l’apprendimento formale della lingua in classe e la sperimentazione LingoBee – che costituisce, come già detto, un tipo di apprendimento autonomo, informale, in situ e collaborativo – si è rivelata necessaria e fondamentale. Questa scelta ha mostrato che la tecnologia da sola non può essere lo strumento centrale nel processo di apprendimento linguistico (secondo le attese iniziali essa avrebbe motivato gli studenti – adulti e quindi già autonomi – e garantito una buona partecipazione al progetto) ma che il docente rimane responsabile e reale animatore dell’uso della tecnologia. Il progetto si è avvalso di due questionari, definiti questionario pre- e post-intervento, i quali servono a) ad individuare i parametri generali entro cui avviene l’apprendimento supportato dal software e b) a misurare, prima e dopo l’uso dell’applicazione, eventuali cambiamenti intervenuti rispetto alle abilità, ai comportamenti, alle attitudini e alle conoscenze dei discenti (e dei docenti) coinvolti nella sperimentazione al fine di stabilire l’efficacia dell’uso di LingoBee. Il questionario in entrata elicita informazioni anagrafiche, informazioni relative agli studi e alle conoscenze pregresse nella lingua target, al tempo di permanenza nel paese target; contiene poi domande sull’uso del telefono cellulare da parte degli studenti (per quali funzioni è usato, se è già stato usato per attività didattiche, e se è stato usato per imparare le lingue e in particolare per accrescere il vocabolario o per conoscere la

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cultura di un paese); prosegue infine con domande sulla motivazione ad imparare la lingua target. Il questionario post-sperimentazione serve a valutare il progetto ed è diviso in due parti: la prima chiede allo studente di valutare l’efficacia degli apprendimenti linguistici e culturali realizzati mediante l’uso di LingoBee (con domande sulle aree linguistiche – lessico, pronuncia, ortografia – meglio supportate da LingoBee, sulle abilità potenziate, sull’effetto rispetto alla motivazione allo studio della lingua); la seconda parte chiede di valutare il software (con giudizi e chiarimenti sull’uso effettivo del software e con una ricognizione sulle attività e funzionalità più usate, in particolare rispetto a un apprendimento di tipo collaborativo).

Risultati I gruppi sono composti da studenti di età compresa tra 21 e 30 anni, che sono in Italia per studiare all’università. Tutti i partecipanti hanno un computer e lo usano per almeno due ore al giorno, anche per connettersi ad Internet. Sono iscritti a vari social network tra cui Facebook e Skype; due studenti dichiarano di avere anche un profilo su Twitter, e altri tre sono iscritti rispettivamente a LinkedIn, a Blogspot e a YouTube. Tra le attività più praticate con il telefono cellulare dichiarano di non navigare su Internet per ricerche o per leggere la posta elettronica, ma di usarlo per scambiare e condividere foto, registrare o scaricare video e musica. Usano però spesso Internet per consultare dizionari online. Le motivazioni addotte rispetto all’apprendimento linguistico sono: il poter comunicare durante il soggiorno Erasmus, il poter accedere ai corsi universitari, il desiderio di integrarsi nella società locale e di conoscerne la cultura. Gli strumenti dichiarati come fonti per incrementare le conoscenze linguistiche e lessicali sono: quaderni, per annotare il lessico, lettura dei giornali, dizionari (soprattutto online) o ricerche su Google. Gli studenti hanno valutato positivamente LingoBee non solo per l’incremento del vocabolario, ma anche per il controllo dell’ortografia; ed infine per la caratteristica della multimedialità – considerata una buona strategia per imparare le lingue. LingoBee viene usato sia per aggiungere nuove parole, sia per cercare parole e anche solo per navigare e leggere il contenuto prodotto da altri. La partecipazione alla creazione di entrate lessicali è realizzata con modalità simili all’uso di social network e pertanto gli utenti esibiscono comportamenti più o meno ‘attivi’. Gli utenti valutano LingoBee come una app facile da usare e utile per vedere cosa ‘postano’ gli altri utenti, mentre l’opzione meno votata è che LingoBee sia una buona risorsa per stare in contatto con gli altri studenti

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del gruppo; vorrebbero veder sviluppare LingoBee o aumentarne le funzionalità (chiedono che diventi più interattivo, come un vero e proprio social network, e che magari promuova gare tra utenti che evidenzino le conoscenze lessicali). Le entrate lessicali prodotte dai due gruppi sono state analizzate in base a diversi fattori. Il primo gruppo ne ha prodotte 92 con una media di 12,5 entrate per studente in 3 mesi. La maggior parte delle entrate è accompagnata da foto, raramente da video, file audio o da link ipertestuali. Non si è riscontrata una correlazione tra livello di coinvolgimento in LingoBee e competenza in italiano pregressa. Le entrate lessicali sono abbastanza varie: il 20% è legato ad argomenti culturali (ad esempio feste e cibo); il 15% circa riguarda la vita quotidiana degli studenti (ad esempio studio, viaggi); il 10% invece è lessico specialistico legato alle attività di studio o di formazione professionale. Il secondo gruppo invece ha prodotto 140 entrate lessicali con una media di 22,1 entrate per studente in tre mesi. Molte di queste sono accompagnate da foto e circa il 10% anche da commenti audio. Anche in questo caso non si è riscontrata una correlazione tra livello di coinvolgimento in LingoBee e competenza in italiano del singolo studente. Le entrate lessicali riguardano la cultura italiana (cibo, moda, tradizioni religiose e la vita quotidiana degli studenti (ad esempio la pulizia della casa, il cucinare, fare la spesa, ecc.). Le entrate lessicali prodotte dal secondo gruppo presentano una minore complessità linguistica da ascriversi al fatto che la competenza media in italiano in questo gruppo è meno forte. Il secondo gruppo, come già detto, è risultato più motivato ed è stato meglio supportato sia in classe sia sul web. Le entrate lessicali sono accompagnate da definizioni che possono essere molto semplici (esempi in (1)) o più articolate (esempi in (2): (1) panchina: questo cosa serve a sedere; cattedra: tavolo dell’insegnante; ciliegia: questo è un frutto; corso di l’italiano: puoi imparare l'italiano qui; l’estintore: puoi estinzione con lo estintore; (2) evidenziatori: per selezionare il piu (sic!) importante di alcune note; parcheggio: qui è dove lasciamo le nostre macchine; fumare: non puoi fumare all'interno dell'edificio [la definizione è accompagnata da una foto del divieto di fumo collocato su una parete all’interno dell’università]; riscaldamento centralizzato: Questo cosa serve a riscaldamento [la definizione è accompagnata da una foto di un

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condizionatore di aria calda e fredda di un edificio dell’ateneo]; crema abbronzante: puoi essere in bronz con crema abbronzante. Nella redazione delle entrate lessicali e delle relative definizioni si osserva una certa creatività. Il punto di partenza nella scelta di cosa includere nel lessico generato dagli utenti sembra perlopiù essere l’esperienza concreta, il mondo reale in cui gli studenti si muovono e l’utilità e necessità di definire e spiegare ciò che circonda immediatamente gli interagenti. In questo senso l’esperienza di creazione del lessico mostra di rispondere ai principi di un apprendimento informale e ‘situato’. Dal punto di vista della morfologia le entrate sono nomi e verbi, parole uniche o polirematiche (corso di l’italiano, crema abbronzante, riscaldamento centralizzato ma anche ferro da stiro ecc.); talvolta la parola viene annotata includendo l’articolo (l’estintore). Dal punto di vista morfologico inoltre la forma di ‘citazione’ non è necessariamente il singolare (evidenziatori). La struttura delle definizioni è varia. Accanto alla definizione formale classica (X è /significa Y), ci sono definizioni meno formali descrittive o in cui la spiegazione rimanda alla funzione del referente designato o ad attività correlate (X è dove io posso fare Y), talvolta si osservano brevi note di carattere personale simili alle note di diario (ad esempio buca delle lettere definito con la nota: devo mandare una lettera a mia sorella), e commenti di tipo espressivo-emotivo (Italia: Io amo molto gli italiani). Le definizioni non sono necessariamente corrette, ad esempio la foto che accompagna l’entrata lessicale riscaldamento centralizzato è in realtà la foto di un condizionatore d’aria. Le definizioni molto presto utilizzano anche nuove strutture che gli studenti hanno appreso a lezione, e che vengono velocemente incorporate. Ad esempio Yasemine usa il pattern ‘puoi fare Y con X’ (dove X è la parola da definire) per definire l’abbronzante o la penna: puoi abbronzarti con l’abbronzante; puoi scrivere con la penna. Risultati coerenti con alcuni principi enunciati nell’ambito dell’approccio lessicale (Lewis 1997), secondo il quale nell’apprendimento lessicale si dà priorità e si riserva attenzione speciale a gruppi di parole funzionali che potrebbero essere riutilizzati e interiorizzati rapidamente anche senza un’analisi grammaticale approfondita e anche da apprendenti principianti con una madrelingua lontana e che hanno solo l’inglese come lingua veicolare. Uno dei contributi specifici che l’unità di ricerca italiana ha voluto mettere a disposizione del progetto è stato l’elaborazione di un test che consentisse di valutare quanto fossero stabilizzate e acquisite le entrate

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lessicali create con LingoBee una volta trascorso un po’ di tempo. A questo scopo è stato costruito un test lessicale che contiene 93 parole tutte ricavate dalle entrate lessicali postate dagli utenti su LingoBee e selezionate in base al grado di utilità in termini di acquisizione del linguaggio. La selezione ha favorito le parole del nucleo del lessico della lingua, cioè parole che hanno un alto rango di frequenza e che sono comuni, legate alla vita quotidiana e non a lessici specialistici. Agli studenti è stato chiesto di contrassegnare le parole che conoscevano e di aggiungere possibilmente brevi definizioni. I risultati del test sono abbastanza incoraggianti: tutti gli apprendenti hanno ricordato in media circa il 60% delle parole del test (dunque delle parole prodotte per LingoBee) e una metà di essi ne ha ricordato circa il 70% o più. Ovviamente maggiori ricerche andrebbero portate avanti proprio per verificare la specificità e la durata nel tempo dell’apprendimento lessicale realizzato mediante LingoBee e per spiegare meglio l’impatto di LingoBee sulla costruzione complessiva del lessico degli apprendenti. Ciononostante ci sentiamo di affermare che le potenzialità della app rispetto all’acquisizione del lessico sono notevoli.

Spazio tiranno e creatività linguistica Il secondo progetto riguarda l’uso del telefono cellulare in una classe di scuola primaria per potenziare l’apprendimento dell’italiano e della scrittura di sintesi. Questo progetto si colloca all’interno di una filiera di studi che valuta le ricadute dell’uso della comunicazione scritta via cellulare – dunque della pratica della scrittura di SMS (Short Message Service, d’ora in poi abbreviato come sms) – in maniera non pregiudizialmente negativa. Come alcuni studi già indicano (Thurlow 2006; Fiorentino in stampa) gli effetti delle tecnologie sulla società e sullo sviluppo delle abilità di base, soprattutto nel campo della scrittura e lettura, sono in buona misura considerati negativi, secondo un tipico determinismo tecnologico in base al quale il nuovo è sempre accolto, almeno inizialmente, in modo negativo (si veda anche Ortoleva 2010). Invece un corposo insieme di articoli, in parte pubblicato in un numero speciale di una rivista online (JCAL),3 mostrerebbe che il rapporto tra la tipica scrittura degli sms (chiamata in ambito angloamericano textese) e le conoscenze ortografiche (capacità di compitazione (spelling) e di lettura) sarebbe in realtà positivo (Coe / Oakhill 2011; Drouin 2011; Durkin et al. 2011; Kemp / Bushnell 2011; Plester et al. 2008; Plester et al. 2009; 3

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Plester et al. 2011; Powell / Dixon 2011; Thurlow 2003; Tonkin 2008; Wood et al. 2011) e più in generale ci sarebbe un impatto positivo dell’uso degli sms sulla competenza metalinguistica di chi ricorre spesso a questo tipo di scrittura. Questa letteratura si propone di confutare affermazioni spesso diffuse dalla stampa popolare secondo cui la pratica scrittoria degli sms rovini la lingua (per via del ricorso frequente ad abbreviazioni, Kemp 2011: 3) (per una rassegna critica sulle ideologie linguistiche diffusa dalla stampa rispetto al mondo giovanile e alla lingua dei giovani si vedano i già citati Thurlow 2006 e Fiorentino in stampa). Il progetto, presentato a famiglie e docenti di italiano, si è svolto in orario extrascolastico per circa 20 ore, coinvolgendo circa 20 alunni di classe quinta i quali hanno aderito su base volontaria e portando il loro telefono cellulare da casa. Il progetto svolto da due esperti è stato proposto come un laboratorio di scrittura che si avvaleva dell’uso del telefono cellulare. Si è trattato dunque di un progetto di apprendimento formale nell’ambito della L1. Gli obiettivi didattici del progetto, in parte discussi con i docenti curricolari, sono lo sviluppo e/o il potenziamento di: a) capacità di sintesi; b) consapevolezza nell’uso di sistemi abbreviativi nella trasmissione e nella (ri)costituzione dei testi; c) conoscenza e uso di scritture brachilogiche; d) riflessione sul sistema T9. Accanto agli obiettivi didattici specifici altri obiettivi formativi e più ampi sono stati: a) creare confidenza con l’uso corretto del cellulare; b) ragionare sulla diversa qualità della scrittura via sms rispetto a quella tradizionale; c) avvicinare in modo giocoso alla scrittura; d) accrescere la consapevolezza sui sistemi di scrittura e sull’ortografia dell’italiano; e) potenziare la riflessione sulla lingua tout court. Sintetizzando gli aspetti meramente organizzativi, che pure hanno sempre una grande importanza nelle sperimentazioni, possiamo osservare come il progetto sia partito con una ricognizione sulle abitudini di scrittura dei bambini coinvolti e sulle abitudini nell’uso del cellulare. Dopodiché si è lavorato sulla scrittura di sintesi relativamente a quattro tipologie di testi (narrativo, scientifico, argomentativo, informativo). Di ogni testo letto in classe veniva richiesto sia un riassunto scritto cartaceo sia una sintesi di poche parole inviata via sms. Accanto alla scrittura di sintesi sono stati prodotti testi brevi di tipo creativo (pensieri liberi, raccontino breve, descrizione) ed infine sono state svolte attività di varia natura focalizzate sulla ‘manualità’ della scrittura via sms (rapidità della scrittura di sms), sull’ortografia (dettato scritto sul cellulare e inviato via sms); sulla comprensione di testi abbreviati. Alla fine del progetto i bambini sono stati invitati a valutarlo mediante un questionario.

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I testi prodotti dai bambini sono stati raccolti e monitorati. I risultati attesi sono molteplici e vertono su vari livelli, dal potenziamento delle abilità di sintesi e scrittura in genere al potenziamento della correttezza ortografica; ma anche al maggiore coinvolgimento nei compiti assegnati e all’aumento della motivazione alla scrittura. Un aspetto della ricerca che solo in parte abbiamo potuto valutare sono state le differenze nelle produzioni con e senza cellulare. Il Questionario pre-intervento è organizzato in tre parti: abitudini di scrittura, abitudini di lettura e uso di computer e cellulare. Rispetto a queste due tecnologie si richiedevano informazioni sul grado di conoscenza di software e su attività svolte con pc o telefono cellulare (navigare per fare ricerche, scaricare file, condividere, scrivere mail, telefonare, fare foto e video, ascoltare musica ecc.), sulla quantità di sms scritti, sulla conoscenza di abbreviazioni ed emoticon. La maggior parte dei bambini rivela scarsa dimestichezza con il textese e dichiara di usare poco il cellulare per scrivere. Le bambine mediamente scrivono più dei maschi. Alcuni bambini dichiarano di possedere un telefono da poco tempo e comunque di essere soggetti ai genitori per la ricarica (il che ne limita l’uso). Nel Questionario finale si chiede ai bambini quante lezioni hanno seguito, se hanno svolto con regolarità o meno le attività del laboratorio, se il progetto è piaciuto e se pensano di essere migliorati nella scrittura di sms e nell’ortografia. Solo 12 bambini hanno svolto il questionario in uscita e le risposte sono unanimemente positive ad eccezione dei risultati relativi alle competenze ortografiche, per le quali i bambini dichiarano di non essere certi di aver migliorato le proprie prestazioni. Contrariamente a quanto dichiarato dai bambini però in uno degli ultimi incontri del progetto le competenze ortografiche sono state testate con un esercizio (Caccia agli errori) e la prestazione ha evidenziato risultati mediamente molto buoni.

Materiali e risultati Accanto ai tradizionali esercizi per valutare le conoscenze ortografiche ai bambini sono stati presentati alcuni codici grafici particolari come il leetspeak e il gibberish. Il leetspeak è un codice alfanumerico che alterna lettere e numeri utilizzando questi ultimi in sostituzione di lettere per analogia iconica: (1) UN 73MP0 L0N74N0, QU4ND0 4V3V0 6 4NN1, 1N UN L1BR0 5ULL3 F0R3573 PR1M0RD1411

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Mentre il gibberish è un codice che scrive le parole invertendo l’ordine naturale delle lettere: (2) C’reauanvlota, un re mtolo rcico e pnetote Per entrambi si sono valutate le capacità di lettura e decodifica. Sono stati inoltre predisposti materiali specifici (cfr. parte del cloze presentato qui come esempio (3)) per valutare a) l’abilità nel riconoscere le principali abbreviazioni usate negli sms italiani; b) la capacità di decodificare i più comuni emoticon. (3) Esempio di cloze costituito da un dialogo svolto per sms sms 1: Ciao Luciana ________ (espressione di felicità) sms 2: Ciao Pietro _________ (occhiolino). Ieri ero ad _____ (una) festa! sms 3: 1 festa? _____ (Che) bello! E dimmi, _________ (com’era) ______ (questa) festa? Per la scrittura di sintesi si sono usati sia stimoli visivi (Racconta in 100 parole il video che hai appena visto in classe e poi sintetizza ulteriormente e scrivi un sms), sia testi. In generale i bambini si sono mostrati entusiasti e divertiti dalle proposte del laboratorio sia rispetto ai materiali usati sia rispetto alla possibilità di utilizzare il telefono cellulare per lavorare in classe. I testi prodotti in modo spontaneo sono semplici, chiari e inizialmente impacciati. In (4)-(7) si veda qualche esempio di sms scritti durante il primo incontro per presentarsi: (4) (5) (6) (7)

Io mi chiamo giovanniciaooooooooooooooo Ciao sono Lorenzo il progetto e bello Ciao sono martina! e sono uno stecchino Ciao mi chiamo michelle e mi trovo qua

Nell’esempio (7) si osserva un uso della deissi (la localizzazione in classe, mi trovo qua) che contrasta con le attese tipiche della scrittura (in cui in genere non c’è condivisione spaziale tra chi scrive e chi legge e quindi l’uso di avverbi deittici come qua è bloccato). In generale, tranne nel caso del testo (6) (che dice qualcosa sull’aspetto fisico), il compito di autopresentazione non viene soddisfatto. Invece già negli incontri successivi altri testi sintetici riescono ad essere più efficaci dal punto di vista comunicativo e risultano molto sciolti

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nelle scelte di registro. Negli esempi (8)-(12) si leggono alcuni sms che rispondono alla consegna: Scrivi un sms per convincere uno dei tuoi genitori a farti dormire a casa del tuo amico/della tua amica del cuore: (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)

Mamma xfavore mi mandi a casa di martina ? Mammy ti prego posso dormire da ade. tiprgtvttb M4mm4 xf4v0r3 p055 4nd4r3 4 c4s4 d1 g103l3 mamma pss andare da ale ti prg We,mmpx 4 drmr da kesia?(*-*)

Risalta immediatamente l’adeguamento ad uno stile informale tipico dello scambio confidenziale, la capacità di creare un testo breve ma coerente e completo. Si evidenzia inoltre la capacità di usare abbreviazioni, emoticon e nel caso di (10) il codice leetspeak appena conosciuto. Infine si veda un ultimo gruppo di testi di sms che rispondono alle richieste di sintetizzare testi (13)-(14) oppure di realizzare una narrazione a partire da uno stimolo visivo (breve video muto) (15)-(17): (13) Il latte deve essere bollito perché i microrganismi possono contaggiare l’uomo (14) è meglio che il latte venga bollito così da poter evitare malattie ch possono trasferirsi dall’animale all’uomo (15) Mr. Bean ha il terrore dell'acqua. Luca (16) Mister Bin si vuole buttare da uno scivolo ma poi viene buttato da un trampolino (17) Mr. Bean si vuole tuffare da 1 scivolo ma viene richiamato vede 1 trampolino e ci sale alla fine h paura e viene spinto Nonostante la produzione di errori ortografici, lo sforzo di realizzare una estrema sintesi è raggiunto in modo abbastanza efficace da tutti gli sms. Nell’ultimo testo l’autore riesce a condensare l’intera narrazione in un testo breve.

Conclusioni Per quanto concerne il primo progetto, mi pare si possa concordare sul fatto che i dispositivi mobili sono strumenti ideali per l’apprendimento autonomo (Reinders / White 2011), ma che un loro uso efficace e appropriato in ambito didattico richieda il supporto del docente. Sicuramente il progetto SIMOLA mostra che se agli studenti, soprattutto

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adulti, vengono offerte occasioni di apprendimento sia formali sia informali essi rivelano maggiore motivazione e apprendono in base ai loro ritmi di apprendimento, obiettivi, interessi e attitudini. Il progetto SIMOLA quindi ha consentito di sperimentare un apprendimento personalizzato. Infine il progetto mostra che la selezione consapevole di strumenti e ambienti di apprendimento è una nuova abilità sempre più richiesta ai docenti: nel realizzare tale valutazione il docente deve aver chiaro se e quanto gli apprendenti abbiano già familiarità con un certo strumento e dovrebbe in modo consequenziale creare le condizioni affinché gli allievi sfruttino al meglio le nuove occasioni di apprendimento. Il progetto SIMOLA infine ha evidenziato nuove interessanti piste di ricerca: ad esempio verificare se il m-learning nell’ambito dell’incremento lessicale possa raggiungere gli stessi risultati anche se non è associato a un contesto di apprendimento formale (cioè se l’uso collaborativo in un gruppo di LingoBee senza rinforzo e scambi in classe ottiene risultati analoghi a quelli sperimentati nel progetto). Un altro aspetto da approfondire riguarda l’utilità ed eventuali vantaggi nell’usare una app come LingoBee per apprendere lingue per scopi speciali (a questo proposito qualche spunto è fornito da un precedente progetto curato del coordinatore di SIMOLA, cioè l’ateneo inglese di Brighton; cfr. Pemberton et al. 2010, 2011). Il progetto Spazio tiranno e creatività linguistica pur nella sua rilevanza scientifica, innovatività e potenzialità ha alla fine prodotto risultati esigui e ha evidenziato la necessità di portare avanti una più ampia sperimentazione. La fascia di età e forse l’area cittadina osservate non costituiscono un buon target rispetto all’uso spontaneo di sms e questo non ha fatto emergere né una particolare creatività da parte dei bambini né una padronanza estrema rispetto a questo tipo di scrittura. Sono stati invece confermati i risultati motivazionali (l’uso del telefono è gradito ai bambini) e la maggiore concentrazione sul compito di scrittura e sulla forma grafica delle parole raggiunti nelle attività del laboratorio. Nel breve spazio della sperimentazione non si è osservata una scomparsa totale degli errori di forma e del resto è mancato il confronto con i docenti curricolari per individuare le valutazioni scolastiche dei singoli bambini e poter apprezzare almeno i progressi dei singoli. La capacità testuale e di sintesi raggiunta non è stata trascurabile, ma anche questa non è stata valutata pienamente per la mancanza di confronto con i risultati scolastici ottenuti nelle attività curricolari simili da parte dei singoli bambini. Entrambi i progetti mostrano le potenzialità delle tecnologie rispetto alle attività linguistiche e evidenziano come con le tecnologie sia possibile

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sperimentare forme di apprendimento nuove e sicuramente motivanti. L’uso delle tecnologie nell’apprendimento curricolare può migliorare l’approccio degli apprendenti giovani, e può favorire minore passività nell’apprendimento anche con apprendenti adulti. Le considerazioni che abbiamo avanzato sono in buona misura ben corroborate dai due progetti sinteticamente presentati in questo contributo.

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—. 2001b. Do They Really Think Differently? In On the Horizon, MCB University Press 9/6, October 2001. A http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20%20Digital%20Nati ves,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part2.pdf. Reinders H. / C. White 2011. Learner autonomy and new learning environments. Language Learning & technology 15/3: 1-3. SIMOLA 2012. LingoBee Repository. A http://itrg.brighton.ac.uk/simola.org/LingoBee/index.php. Thurlow C. 2003. Generation txt? The sociolinguistics of young people's text-messaging. Discourse Analysis Online 1 —. 2006. From statistical panic to moral panic: the metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 11/3: 667701. Thurlow C. (ed.). 2009. Against technologization: young people, mediated discourse and communication technologies. Special issue of the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication 14/4: 1038-1049. Tonkin E. 2008. Orthography, structure and lexical choice as identity markers in social tagging environments. In IADIS International Conference on Web Based Communities 2008: 63-69. Wood C. / E. Jackson / L. Hart / B. Plester / L. Wilde 2011. The effect of text messaging on 9- and 10-year-old children’s reading, spelling and phonological processing skills. JCAL 27: 28-36.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ANYTIME ANYWHERE LEARNING: HOW MOBILE APPS AFFECT SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING SANDRA PETRONI UNIVERSITY OF ROME “TOR VERGATA”, ITALY

Introduction Over the last few years, mobile devices have come to play a pivotal role in our society since they have had and are still having an exceptional impact on users: their presence contributes to shaping our social habitus.1 Moreover, mobile technology is nowadays a crucial part of our lives and this is a typical aspect of most communication technologies: that of becoming an essential factor in our daily activities and social practices. Learning, and in this context second language learning, is strongly involved in this transformation; in fact the term Mobile Learning (ML) has been coined to identify whatever users learn via portable devices at anytime and anywhere. To what extent do learning and teaching need to be revised in the light of this transformation? And above all, can learning be improved by mobile technology? The aim of this research is therefore to reflect on whether and how mobile learning affects second language learning processes. Many studies2 have claimed that it is thanks to mobility – no space boundaries, more informal instruction, greater collaboration among peers 1

The sociological concept of habitus refers to lifestyle, the behaviours, the values, and the expectations of particular social groups that are obtained through the experiences and practices of everyday life. It could be described as “a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste” (Scott and Marshall 1998). 2 The detailed literature of these studies will be provided in the following sections.

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etc. – that learners succeed in their language learning processes. Motivation seems to be enhanced, especially when these apps address young learners (‘digital natives’), since they find learning on the move natural and enjoyable. These new systems for second language learning will be the subject of this study and attention will be drawn to those which are available on the web for free or at a very low cost in order to understand the real added value they offer to language learning and how users evaluate their efficacy and effectiveness. What emerges from the analysis of the apps under investigation is the tendency to partially exploit the affordances of mobile technology and hence to reproduce digital contents, materials, and activities that are very similar to those presented in traditional syllabi, either printed or electronic. Of course, this could be justified by the fact that we are at the outset of a new cultural and social change, including learning practices, and as a consequence we tend to adapt already existing materials to the new mobile devices – that is to say to make contents migrate from a book or a PC to a smartphone – so as to cope with this rapid transformation. It is necessary therefore to speculate on the one hand on the real affordances of mobile technology in terms of characteristics, properties, and potential and hence to shed light on the cognitive and affective implications they have on learning.3 On the other, we need to further speculate on how mobile learning and second language learning interact and to what extent the latter exploits the former in terms of creative learning and motivation. All this will be discussed in the second section. The understanding of how these new learning systems are experienced and consequently evaluated by learners becomes crucial. A survey in fact was carried out on a sample of 96 users whose ages and motivation to learn or improve their English as a second language were heterogeneous. They were requested to utilize one app in particular for a short period and then to answer a questionnaire concerning opinions and evaluation of their learning experience. This experimental study will be shown in the third section, after a brief overview of some mobile apps available on the web market. Research findings will be corroborated by a discussion on the users’ evaluation of the mobile app provided by the questionnaires in the fourth section and, finally, concluding remarks will suggest the directions further studies on mobile apps for second language learning should take in order to design and offer effective tools and methodologies for future teaching and learning experiences respectively. 3

We refer here to cognitive and meta-cognitive processes, such as attention, awareness, reasoning, memory, planning, communication and social abilities, and emotional management.

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The theoretical framework of mobile technology and learning Mobile devices are an integral part of users’ daily lives, including their learning experiences. However, mobile technology does not just mean delivering content to portable devices, so-called PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Looking at their functionalities (Table 1), it is clear that their uses imply more than simple content delivery inasmuch as the activities involved reflect a vast range of cognitive and meta-cognitive skills (Petroni 2014). Organisation, for example, entails planning; relaxation entails emotional management; communication entails collaboration, social interactions and abilities; and information entails different activities. But one in particular conflates several competences and critical thinking abilities, i.e. selecting information, which in turn implies identifying concepts, gathering information according to target criteria, focusing attention, and lastly appraisal. Table 1. PDA functionalities (cf. Trinder, 2007: 23, my adaptation) FUNCTIONALITY Organisation

Relaxation

Communication

Information

USE x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

Calendar/diary Addresses To-do-lists Memo/note pad Camera Music, audio books Games, quizzes E-books Movie player Video Phone Email Sms News channel References Dictionaries Web browsers GPS compass

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The properties of Web 2.0 are at the heart of these functionalities. As Kress and Pachler claim (2007), recent years have seen an increase in the social networking capability of web-based services provided by Web 2.0. Web 2.0 refers to online collaboration affordances, such as sharing services, constructing participatory contents (e.g. weblogs, wikis), posting comments, and exchanging deliberative opinions, which facilitate the sharing of meaning by users. Furthermore, they enhance a kind of organisation and categorisation of content which are based on another meaning-bearing technology known as hyperlinking. This allows for both human-computer interaction and computer-mediated human-to-human interaction. When users click on links, they perceive these as computational acts which give rise to mediated social actions (Petroni 2011). Users may apply the same social rules and expectations to computers as people do to humans in the real world. For this reason, these technologies can affect people’s attitudes and engagement and lead them to carry out, anytime, anywhere, communicative activities, such as posting, commenting on or sharing but also logging in, clicking on links etc. which, in addition, imply evaluation. Today, the new affordances of mobile technologies include a combination of technologyand user-related factors, namely flexibility/portability, multi-functionality and technical convergence,4 multimodality, nonlinearity (i.e. hyperlinking), interactivity and communicative potential,5 meta-collaboration,6 and virtuality (or hyperreality) (Kress / Pachler 2007: 12-14). In ML learners are users and therefore occupy a hybrid position which is aptly described by Bruns (2007: 3) as that of “produsers” (producer and user). Consequently, the emergent necessity arising from learners who live in the ‘mobile’ society is that of developing a new habitus of learning. There is a need for a substantial transformation in what is called “information habitus” (Böck 2004), that is, from a habitus where learners can rely on ‘authorities’ to bring information and knowledge to them (read here teachers or instructors) to one in which the learners are now responsible for acquiring and shaping that knowledge for themselves. ML means decentralisation of knowledge, but at the same time personalisation 4

Mobile devices now normally bring together more than one function and ML too is often blended with other types of learning giving rise to an enhancement of the learning experience, a combination of formal and informal instruction. 5 Mobile devices allow for new forms of creative relations between people on the basis of reciprocity and negotiation, in writing and in speech, in real time (synchronously) or delayed (asynchronously). 6 The capacity of collaboration with others across traditional barriers of place, peer/age/interest/professional groups, social strata etc.

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(or customisation) of learning contents, and use of different learning styles (auditory, visual and kinaesthetic) simultaneously. The portability factor along with the collaborative potentialities of mobile communication influence the learning experiences in terms of interaction-among-peers, access to resources, data sharing, and above all immediacy. Learners can learn at anytime and anywhere, that is to say, they can manage their time and their learning environment, and this process makes the learning experience more successful and motivates learners to proceed towards further knowledge (Hutchinson / Waters 1987; Petroni 2004). Mobility, in combination with social networking capabilities, works as an incredibly powerful ‘attention grabber’. Being “always on” (Baron 2008) and hence staying continuously connected with the community of learners (often also with instructors) becomes a key factor since the uninterrupted connection and interactions further stimulate the attention of learners. When learners are stimulated to pay attention constantly and selectively they become more active and motivated. In Second Language Acquisition (SLA), for example, paying attention develops noticing techniques, “and motivated learners may also try harder and more persistently to understand the significance of noticed language, achieving higher levels of awareness and enhanced learning as a result” (Schmidt 2010: 734). According to Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis, “input does not become intake for language learning unless it is noticed, that is, consciously registered” (ibid.: 721). He offers further insight into the concept of awareness in relation to noticing by arguing that awareness can be constructed on two levels: a low level, that is, noticing – “the conscious registration of attended specific instances of language” (ibid.: 725) – and understanding, a higher level of awareness that includes generalisations across instances, knowledge of rules and metalinguistic awareness. His proposal is that noticing is as necessary as understanding, or rather it is the primary stimulus for SLA, both for explicit and implicit instruction. Thus, mobile second language learning can be effectively motivating and successful. But to what extent are the apps available on the web market for second language learning conceived and developed so as to endorse all these cognitive and affective mechanisms? The experimental research which follows has been carried out in order to verify whether these apps really exploit the potentialities of ML.

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The experimental study A brief overview of mobile apps on the web market If we consider the several types of PDA functionalities and uses (Table 1) on the one hand, and the affordances and potentialities of mobile devices on the other, the difference between e-learning, or distance learning, and mobile learning should be evident. Today there is a rapid shift from CALL (Computer Assisted Language Learning) towards MALL7 (Mobile Assisted Language Learning) thanks to the integration of mobile technology into learning practices, although early MALL activities mirrored CALL activities. However, so far many instantiations of mobile apps designed for second language learning simply deliver a portable version of e-learning contents without exploiting the peculiarities of Web 2.0. By analysing recent surveys dated from 2006 to 2011, it is possible to state that many projects8 at the beginning used basically mobile phones for activities such as vocabulary practice, quiz delivery, live tutoring, and email lesson content delivery, whereas handheld PCs were used for file sharing, video playback and stylus text entry. Only recently, as PDAs (smartphones, iPads, tablets) have become more widespread and have integrated functions such as text messaging and voice recording, have ebook grammars, online versions of digital language dictionaries, phrase books, and flashcard programs been incorporated within the systems. Complete language courses today can be delivered and utilised on mobile devices. As for free mobile apps, the app market (for Android, iPhone, iPad etc.) on the web is boundless and it is possible to monitor language

7

A clear distinction between content-related MALL and design-related MALL (Kukulska-Hulme / Shield 2008) needs to be made. The first employs mobile devices as a means of delivering content to learners by using a traditional teacherled approach; the second, by giving more emphasis to learner needs and design issues, exploits mobility and portability to engage learners in interactions with the teacher and/or other learners and to make them define their own learning and even provide materials for other learners. 8 Chinnery 2006; Ley / Kennedy 2007; Browne / Culligan 2008; Chen / Hsieh / Kinshuk 2008; Kukulska-Hulme / Shield 2008; Song / Fox 2008; Stockwell 2008; Liu 2009; Pemberton / Winter / Fallahkhair 2009; Chen / Li 2010; Wong / Chin / Tan / Liu 2010; Godwin-Jones 2011. This list, of course, is not comprehensive but many of these sources are in turn detailed overviews.

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learning apps thanks to the AppAppeal9 website. The most popular apps are shown in Table 210. Their structures, content organisation, and activities are very similar. What is interesting to notice is that almost all the web apps present themselves as online language communities for language learning and as soon as the learner activates registration a Facebook-like community appears, emphasising not only their mission but also their collaborative nature. Potentially, they provide activities such as interaction-among-peers, access to resources/realia, data sharing, etc. However, these seem to be backgrounded in order to foreground those activities that are more similar to traditional tasks and practices. Table 2 The top ten list of second language apps APP

1.Busuu 2.Babbel 3.LiveMocha 4.LingQ 5.Verbling 6.EnglishCentral 7.Voxy 8.Mango Languages 9.Myngle 10.My Happy Planet

9

URL

www.busuu.com www.babbel.com www.livemocha.com www.lingq.com www.verbling.com www.englishcentral.com www.voxy.com www.mangolanguages.com www.myngle.com www.myhappyplanet.com

Native and web-based syncing11 ¥ ¥ ¥

¥ ¥

Available at http://www.appappeal.com/apps/language-learning. AppAppeal uses information gathered by Alexa, an American company which provides web traffic data, to create its ranking. It is updated automatically, so the information available is always up to date. The basic criterion is popularity determined by hits and rating (1 to 5 stars). 10 There are also many other web-based apps which have not been taken into consideration simply because they are part of e-learning platforms which have integrated their courses with mobile apps only to reinforce activities (listening and vocabulary), e.g. InnovativeLanguage.com, Transparent.com, and some of them are very expensive, e.g. Rosetta Stone. 11 The tick stands for those web apps which have mobile apps syncing mobile and desktop versions.

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Aim and hypotheses The aim of this survey was indeed twofold: 1) to explore the degree of appreciation of mobile language learning within a heterogeneous group of participants by matching the socio-linguistic variables of gender, age, education, and occupation with the utilisation and evaluation of the sample app; 2) to gain understanding of how to build up future syllabi for schools, university language centres and private/autonomous language courses. This second purpose was based on the assumption that most educational institutions (schools and university language centres) utilise mobile technology and/or mobile apps in a way that fits traditional classroom teaching in terms of tasks and practices through teacher mediation and knowledge transmission. In fact, as the reports analysed and the apps investigated for this study demonstrate12, these projects partially exploit the potentialities of mobile devices. For example, direct interaction, peer collaboration and content sharing are mostly ignored (Sharples 2006). The following hypotheses were tested: Hypothesis 1: learners appreciate the time and space boundless learning activities though they lack teacher-led instruction. Hypothesis 2: the mobile learning app under investigation is not considered a complete, motivating, and useful learning tool by the users and consequently their level of satisfaction is not high. Hypothesis 3: learners consider the learning activities provided by the app similar to those of traditional learning syllabi. We expected to find the socio-linguistic variables determinant, in particular for Hypothesis 1, since they mark the boundary between different categories of habitus.

Description of the method Participants. Non-random purposive sampling was carried out13 to find the most cognitively appropriate samples of participants. As a result, users were recruited via both email and social networks and selected on the basis of three criteria: 1. good command of and positive attitude towards mobile technology; 2. availability of portable devices; 3. positive attitude towards the study of English. 96 users (52 females and 44 males) participated in 12 13

Cf. section 3.1 and footnote 8. The author thanks Veronica Romano for her contribution to data collection.

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the experiment and their age ranged from 10 to 62 years. 55% of the sample was composed of digital natives,14 and only 25% were students while 75% were workers/employees. Their educational background ranged from secondary education (63%) to graduate (18%) and post-graduate (8%). As for English proficiency, participants were given the option to self-assess their language competence using four categories: CEFR15 level A2 (15%), B1 (34%), B2 (32%), and C1 (18%). Materials. As stated above, the structure, content organisation, and activities of each app are very similar. For this reason the most popular app, i.e. Busuu, was chosen as the sample app. The free version includes 20 complete learning units from beginner to advanced intermediate levels,16 covering 150 different topics and using day-to-day situations, and their sections are divided into grammar topics and/or categories (e.g. Family, Friends, Office) with an extensive vocabulary (over 3,000 words and key phrases). When the learner starts a unit s/he can choose the activity to be carried out: vocabulary (flash card programme and a phrase book integrated with audio and image), dialogue, writing, speaking (voice recording and speech recognition systems), chatting (Busuu talk), podcast and PDF supporting material. The app provides learners with comprehensive audio-visual learning material, photos and recordings by native speakers, direct interaction with native speakers, and customisable review options with learner progression (tutoring or peer reviewing). Learners, in fact, can submit their writing exercises and get corrected by an online tutor or by native speakers from the community.17 The four skills can be potentially practised, although reading and writing are predominant, listening is regularly proposed but speaking (vocal messaging, chat, Skype etc.) together with video and audio recording are rarely used to support learner communication and collaboration. As for the questionnaire, it was based on the model provided by Pieri and Diamantini (2006) for the evaluation of mobile learning. It was submitted via Google Drive or sent via email and participants could fill it in online. It was composed of 41 questions (33 required multiple / structured answers while eight required an open answer) and divided into 14 Users born between 1985 and 2002 are considered as digital natives whereas those born between 1940 and 1985 are considered as digital immigrants. 15 CEFR stands for Common European Framework of Reference for languages. 16 A1 - B2 according to CEFR. 17 For this reason, when the learners make their registration, they are requested to write not only the second language they want to learn, but also their native language and email address.

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three sections gathering information about: 1) users’ personal data; 2) users’ technical abilities/competencies and frequency of use of portable devices; 3) users’ opinions on Busuu app. Procedure. Participants were instructed on the survey and asked to download the free app on their portable devices. At the beginning they were requested to self-evaluate their English competence in order to start at the appropriate language level and then they were given a week to test the app. They were not asked to complete a precise number of units but they were allowed to decide what to do, when, where and how. Only at the end of the week were they sent the questionnaire and asked to fill it in within five days and to send it back. In this way, learners were not influenced by the questions and they were free to use the app as they preferred. Of course, a one-week trial of the app is not sufficient to evaluate their language improvement: however, it is possible to monitor their level of appreciation of the app.

Results and discussion Once the data were collected and sorted, it was possible to analyse the results in terms of users’ appreciation and evaluation of mobile second language learning by matching the results with the socio-linguistic variables of gender, age, educational background, and occupation. The discussion is focused on those questions containing specific issues which mainly explain users’ attitude towards ML and better address the three hypotheses posited at the beginning. Table 3 shows how the users evaluate the learning experience. For example, if we look at the gender variable we can state that males have a more positive attitude towards ML than females (50% of males consider ML highly useful while 32% ascribe to it an average usefulness), although the level of satisfaction in terms of language improvement sharply decreases18 in both groups. Both females and males report a notable lack of teacher-led instruction even if females seem to be more autonomous in terms of methodology whereas males are more autonomous in terms of time management. If we analyse the same questions according to the age factor, that is, if users are digital natives or immigrants, the situation changes. Both groups evaluate ML more or less positively and language improvement remains 18 Many participants, however, said that one-week testing was not enough to evaluate their language improvement.

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Table 3. Users’ evaluation of their learning experience

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basically low; however, digital immigrants give a higher level of satisfaction of their learning experience. As for a lack of teacher-led instruction, digital natives see the importance of the role of the teacher far less than digital immigrants, in particular regarding methodology and time management. A lower level of educational background determines a more positive attitude towards ML, whereas graduate and post-graduate participants seem to be more critical and demanding in all the issues posited (as Table 4 demonstrates). The occupation factor, of course, is a critical factor and determines, on average, a more favourable attitude when users are students (neither group, however, reports significant language improvements). Students, although preferring teacher-led instruction, appreciate ML in terms of methodology and time management more than workers/employees. It is possible to state that Table 3 confirms Hypothesis 1) and hence that learners are favourable to ML and they see the time and space boundless learning activities positively. However, a lack of teacher-led instruction represents a disincentive and affects the way users learn, regardless of the social category. Table 4 focuses on the Busuu app. The third section of the questionnaire concerned the overall organization and structure of the app, its graphics in terms of clarity and user-friendliness, and the contents within the units. By cross-matching these elements with the same social factors, we can state that more or less all categories provide a generally positive evaluation, with the exception of the category of users with a higher level of education and that comprising students. The favourable judgement concerning the overall structure is influenced by the fact that the majority of participants assess the graphics – and also usability – very positively, and this can be a motivating factor. However, when participants are asked to evaluate Busuu’s contents in terms of attractiveness, completeness, appropriateness and usefulness, the positive attitude changes slightly and hence all categories consider contents as attractive and interesting though not useful (in particular for females). Evaluation is slightly lower when users assess the appropriateness of contents and becomes significantly low as regards the completeness of contents. Only for this last parameter do the diverse groups provide different results: the level of satisfaction of females, digital natives and students is the lowest.

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Table 4. Users’ evaluation of the structure, graphics and contents of Busuu app

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Table 4 partially confirms Hypothesis 2). In fact, the mobile learning app under investigation is not considered as a complete and appropriate learning tool by the users but their level of satisfaction in terms of overall structure, graphics and attractiveness is not low. This sort of discrepancy reflects the divide that exists between the positive attitude towards mobile learning apps these users had and the expectations for the Busuu app which were not completely fulfilled. Users expected the real affordances of mobile learning to be exploited, and this did not occur. At the same time they found the contents within the activities interesting but not comprehensive. The last three open questions in the survey confirm Hypothesis 3). The questions were: -

Identify two positive elements of the app Identify two negative elements of the app Provide possible suggestions to improve the app

Clearly, it is impossible to list all the answers. However, what interests us most is that, for example, in the first question, the more positive elements highlighted in the answers are related above all to technical properties and graphics, and only few answers focus on language items (e.g. rich vocabulary, dialogue, writing exercises, language games, etc.). The most frequently mentioned negative elements are: repetitive exercises, scarcity of grammar sections, and short units. Finally, the suggestions offered by users address speaking tasks, voice recording, improving grammar sections, adding dialogues and readings. All these indications reflect how users evaluated the app. They perceived it as a traditional learning syllabus because the Busuu app, like many other apps available on the web, is designed exactly like a conventional student’s book, with the same drill activity-oriented exercises. Learners did not recognise the mobile learning potential of the app, with the exception of flexibility and portability, since the very few activities that represent the real innovations of ML such as direct interaction with native speakers, sharing contents via social networking, and peer reviewing are substantially backgrounded. None, in fact, focused on or even practiced them. Within the app, relevance and salience are given to traditional activities mainly and this requires greater guidance from the tutor/teacher in terms of methodology and motivation. Thus, users’ level of appreciation could not be high since they expected to find a teacher-led instruction along with more comprehensive units, tasks and activities, as occurs in traditional language teaching classes.

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Conclusion Mobile learning development for studying languages is currently progressing at a feverish pace, in particular that of native and web apps. From a pedagogical point of view, the crucial element in ML is the content architecture: how learning objects can be designed in accordance with the affordances of mobile technology. The problem resides in the novel activities which are not designed and presented effectively and which do not play a prominent role in the syllabus design of most mobile apps. These apps still rely on traditional teaching and learning practices. For this reason, paradoxically, students are directed mainly towards conventional exercises rather than towards new activities. Chatting, peer revision, data sharing are proposed as secondary practices. At this stage, mobile learning needs to be still embedded in, and fostered by, a blended instructional context, through the combination of digital social media and web-based technology with established classroom forms and faceǦtoǦface instructorǦled training.19 A formal implementation of mobile apps within a blended context can better engage students in the learning process. Clearly, the role of the teacher is necessary in order to instruct the students on how to use and integrate the new activities effectively within the syllabus. But in the light of what has been said so far and in order to promote a more motivating second language learning via mobile technologies, educators should allow their students to develop user-generated media contents and to create learning objects on their own, in particular in postcompulsory education. What really makes the difference between distance and mobile learning is how students can co-construct their language content, and hence their knowledge and competences, through activities such as downloading/uploading video/audio files recording, content sharing, crowdsourcing,20 carrying out collaborative listening, speaking, and writing activities via social networks, wikis, blogs to solve problems and fill information gaps. 19

Cf. Bonk / Graham 2006; Russell et al. 2009; Geer 2009. Crowdsourcing is, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.” Crowdsourcing is used to build databases of informal language usage, featuring an app communicating with a database through Web services. It also uses RSS feeds to keep users informed of new content added. Some apps, for example, allow users to search for use of terms within Twitter messages thanks to the widespread use of social networking. 20

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The change of habitus resides undoubtedly in mobility and portability but only if these are joined to interactivity, communicative potential and (meta)collaboration. These affordances permit learners to create their own content, to satisfy their co-learners’ request for specific information or to share material they consider as useful or relevant to the needs of the community of learners, but also to enlarge their learning space and interact beyond the constraints of the traditional and fixed learning environment. These potentialities must be translated into language learning activities and tasks, but to do this language educators, lecturers, trainers, and educational content producers need to fully develop a collaborative culture applied to second language learning. In mobile contexts, the autonomy of a learner can be endorsed and augmented more than in any other environment. Learning becomes more real and permanent when tied to learners’ decisions concerning content, time and space made outside the institutional educational environment (Sandberg / Maris / de Geus 2011). Moreover, students are affected by mobile devices' affordances since in this way their attention can be continuously stimulated. Attention and noticing are two cognitive processes that mediate input and L2 development through interaction (Schmidt 2010). Thanks to interaction, a learner’s attention is focused on a specific part of language, especially on those interferences between second language forms and first language forms (Mackey 2006). According to the results that have emerged in other research projects (Sharples 2006; Mockus / Dawson / Edel-Malizia / Shaffer / Sung An / Swaggerty 2011), students want more mobile content, and educational institutions would benefit greatly by starting to develop courses and content that are mobile-friendly, rather than waiting for the technology to be course- and content-friendly. Therefore, future research in mobile content development for studying languages needs to focus on the affordances of these devices to enhance learning rather than on the devices themselves. Consequently, a strong emphasis should be placed on reassessing how courses and learning objects are designed for mobile devices in order to exploit their full potential.

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Mackey A. 2006. Feedback, noticing and instructed second language learning. Applied Linguistics 27: 405-430. Mockus L. / L. Dawson / S. Edel-Malizia / D. Shaffer / J. Sung An / A. Swaggerty 2011. The Impact of Mobile Access on Motivation: Distance Education Student Perceptions. Pennsylvania State University: Penn State World Campus. Pachler N. 2007. Mobile Learning. Towards a Research Agenda. London: The WLE Centre, Institute of Education. Pemberton L. / M. Winter / S. Fallahkhair 2009. A user created content approach to mobile knowledge sharing for advanced language learners. Proceedings of mLearn 2009, Orlando, Florida: 184-187. Petroni S. 2004. Cognition, affect, simulation and performance: the four corners of the learning space. Rivista di Psicolinguistica Applicata IV/1: 53-69. —. 2011. Language in the Multimodal Web Domain. Toronto-Rome: Legas-Aracne. —. 2014. Cognitive and affective implications of mobile technology for second language learning”. Rivista di Psicolinguistica Applicata XIV/1: 97-111. Pieri M. / D. Diamantini 2007. E-learning e m-learning: uno strumento di valutazione per il mobile learning. ISDM Informations, Savoirs, Décisions, Médiations. Journal International des Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication. At http://www.chersi.it/listing/fortutor2007/2_modulo/materiali/isdm25. pdf. Russell M. / G. Kleiman / R. Carey / J. Douglas 2009. Comparing selfǦpaced and cohortǦbased online courses for teachers. Journal of Research on Technology in Education 41/4: 443-466. Sandberg J. / M. Maris / K. De Geus 2011. Mobile English learning: an evidence-based study with fifth graders. Computers & Education 57: 1334-1347. Schmidt R. 2010. Attention, awareness, and individual differences in language learning. In W. M. Chan et al. (eds), Proceedings of CLaSIC 2010, Singapore, December 2-4, 721-737. Singapore: National University of Singapore, Centre for Language Studies. Scott J. / G. Marshall 1998. A Dictionary of Sociology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sharples M. 2006. Big Issues in Mobile Learning, Learning Sciences Research. Nottingham: University of Nottingham.

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Song Y. / R. Fox 2008. Using PDA for undergraduate student incidental vocabulary testing. European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning 20/3: 290-314. Stockwell G. 2008. Investigating learner preparedness for and usage patterns of mobile learning. ReCALL 20/3: 253-270. Trinder J. 2007. Mobile technologies and systems. In A. Kukulska-Hulme / J. Traxler (eds), Mobile Learning. A Handbook for Educators and Trainers. London / New York: Routledge: 7-24. Wong L.H. / C.K. Chin / C.L. Tan / M. Liu 2010. Students’ personal and social meaning making in a Chinese idiom mobile learning environment. Educational Technology & Society 13/4: 15-26.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR ATTIVITÀ FUORI AULA E TECNOLOGIE IPERMEDIALI NELLA DIDATTICA DELLA LINGUA ITALIANA

ANNA TOSCANO CA’ FOSCARI UNIVERSITY OF VENICE, ITALY

Introduzione Oggetto di questo saggio è un progetto elaborato negli ultimi otto anni al Centro Linguistico di Ateneo dell’Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia all’interno dei corsi istituzionali di italiano L2 e approfondito in tre anni di ricerca durante un dottorato in Scienze del Linguaggio, presso il medesimo Ateneo. Il progetto riguarda la didattica dell’italiano ad adulti attraverso tecnologie, attraverso la letteratura e attraverso i luoghi che una città mette a disposizione e prende le mosse dalle necessità dell’insegnamento linguistico oggi in rapporto ai cambiamenti causati dai giovani e dalle tecnologie in un’epoca anche di cultura digitale. Il progetto sperimentato è stato declinato in uno studio approfondito che riguarda l’insegnamento della L2 e della letteratura attraverso città, con particolare attenzione a uno sviluppo futuro attraverso ipermedia. Come città è stata scelta Venezia, luogo di incontro e luogo di apprendimento in cui converge un crogiolo di discipline – arte, letteratura, storia, cinema, chimica, cucina, musica, economia e molto altro ancora – che fanno della città un luogo fisico aperto a una didattica esperienziale. L’obiettivo finale del progetto, ancora in elaborazione teorica, è quello di costruire un ipermedia che permetta di insegnare L2 attraverso la nuova tecnologia, per potenziare il processo di apprendimento. La necessità di tale riflessione è nata dalla consapevolezza dei limiti dei testi che vengono adottati in classe per l’insegnamento dell’italiano L2, della necessità costante di integrarli con materiale non solo autentico ma soprattutto con materiale motivante legato alla città in cui gli studenti

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stanno apprendendo la lingua. Tuttavia non è secondaria una riflessione sulle TIC e di un certo rilievo la questione dell’interazione nell’apprendimento dei giovani nati in epoca digitale. Molti giovani nati in epoca digitale, infatti, sono esposti al mondo digitale nel quale vivono, accerchiati da diversi media e raggiunti da informazioni che provengono simultaneamente a più organi di senso e da diversi strumenti o canali. È consuetudine ormai vedere i giovani stare al computer e in contemporanea mandare un sms e nel frattempo mangiare un panino e rispondere al telefono di casa. Questa consuetudine è ormai il loro modo di stare al mondo e di rapportarsi a esso. Lo psicopedagogista americano Richard. E. Mayer (2001) sottolinea come la multimedialità adotti più canali sensoriali e sia un processo cognitivo dinamico che porta all’acquisizione di nuove conoscenze. A oltre dieci anni dalle teorie di Mayer questo processo cognitivo dinamico si è evoluto, possiamo definirlo dinamico partecipe se prendiamo in considerazione la prospettiva di Henry Jenkins in cui definisce i giovani nati nell’epoca digitale dei “prosumer” attivi (2010: 29). Oggi i giovani hanno un ruolo non passivo ma attivo verso l’apprendimento che implica la creazione, la produzione, il consumo e la distribuzione. Per essere “prosumer”, cioè al contempo produttori e consumatori, secondo Henry Jenkins, i giovani mettono in atto un apprendimento informale, dunque non legato alle istituzioni, con una propensione verso la sperimentazione del sapere. Questi sono giovani nati in epoca digitale e sono istintivamente portati a un apprendimento attraverso il gioco, la simulazione, la performance, l’appropriazione, il multitasking, la conoscenza distribuita, l’intelligenza collettiva, la navigazione transmedia, il networking. Come agire e interagire in sede di insegnamento della L2 tra apprendimento formale e informale, tra attenzione ai libri di testo e considerazione delle nuove tecnologie, è una questione che ci siamo posti. E abbiamo provato una strada che potrebbe essere una sutura tra due mondi, il digitale e il non-digitale: la strada della città e la tecnologia ipermediale. Nel saggio dedicato all’Educazione linguistica che inaugura la rivista EL.LE Paolo E. Balboni dedica il quinto capitolo alla dimensione etica nell’educazione linguistica. In questo capitolo cerca di individuare le linee di morale soggettiva e di etica oggettiva chiedendosi quale sia a livello teorico il “bene nell’educazione linguistica” e a livello operativo quale sia “il bene nell’atto di educazione linguistica” (2012: 11). All’interno di questa riflessione Balboni elenca tre assi relazionali umani sui quali bisognerebbe basare un’etica glottodidattica, il primo asse è (2012: 12):

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Io e il mondo, gli «altri», la culturizzazione: un insegnamento della lingua, soprattutto non nativa – seconda, straniera, etnica, classica – che trascuri la dimensione culturale non risulta eticamente accettabile: ciò vale per l’approccio grammatico-traduttivo, per quello strutturalistico, ma anche per quello comunicativo se lo si riduce ai problemi di cultura quotidiana (il breakfast con uova e pancetta, il caffè americano ecc.) e non si introducono i temi di cultura profonda, cioè di civiltà (senso dello stato, della famiglia ecc.) e di comunicazione interculturale.

È da qui che vorremmo prendere le mosse per parlare di attività fuori aula in quanto tali attività sono state per anni presso il CLA di Venezia un bacino di sperimentazione e di osservazione. Con la definizione di attività fuori aula intendiamo quelle attività inserite all’interno di un percorso di insegnamento della lingua L2 ma che avvengono al di fuori dell’aula, dunque nella città e negli spazi che la città offre (musei, chiese e quant’altro). Da queste esperienze, infatti, proponiamo l’approccio alla realtà della città in glottodidattica come parte di un percorso che comprende anche l’ipermedialità: le TIC nell’insegnamento insieme all’esperienza concreta di una città. Ci riferiamo alla città in cui si sta insegnando la lingua italiana come L2, e all’attenzione che Balboni pone all’introduzione di temi di cultura profonda, di civiltà e di comunicazione interculturale. Ci sembra da sottolineare inoltre l’importanza nell’insegnamento di portare “il mondo nell’aula”, il materiale autentico in classe, ma anche l’aula nel mondo, aprire la classe a esperienze nella città. Con la definizione “portare il mondo nell’aula” intendiamo l’utilizzo di materiale autentico, la selezione di testi grigi dalla letteratura, l’adozione di manuali il più possibile coerenti con una didattica comunicativa, il ricorso a tecnologie motivanti ecc. Portare l’aula nel mondo comporta una organizzazione più complessa, o ancora farraginosa, in cui è indispensabile tenere conto di alcune teorie generali e ricordare di ricorrere a delle strategie. Le attività fuori aula sperimentate sono attività che rientrano in un percorso didattico programmato che comprende una preparazione in aula soprattutto attraverso materiale multimediale, si svolgono in orario extrascolastico, in una sede che non è l’aula scolastica, e vengono programmate in tre fasi: x prima fase: in aula, con banchi e sedie, in un contesto tradizionale e formale, attraverso un apprendimento strutturato e organizzato;

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x seconda fase: fuori aula, in un luogo della città all’aperto o al chiuso, in un contesto non formale, apprendimento organizzato, intenzionale ma extra curricolare; x terza fase: conclusione con attività svolte in autonomia da piccoli gruppi di studenti. La parte che riguarda il fuori aula implica delle potenzialità da sottolineare: x un’ambientazione ricca di stimoli ipotizzabili e di stimoli non ipotizzabili; x degli stimoli che aprono anche a un apprendimento incidentale (non voluto); x un’occasione per creare nuovi scenari relazionali tra gli studenti e tra studenti e docente; x una presentazione variata e integrata dell’input favorisce l’intake. L’aspetto motivazionale anche in questa fase extra-aula è molto importante, soprattutto nella prospettiva di Titone (1970), secondo il quale la motivazione nell’apprendimento linguistico è “dinamogenetico”. Infatti, quella di Titone è una prospettiva didattica che conduce a coinvolgere la persona nella sua interezza semiotica, dunque le lingue si apprendono non solo prestando attenzione alle spiegazioni verbali di un docente, ma anche con la vista, il movimento, il tatto, l’azione. Da qui la nostra ipotesi che tutto ciò che avviene extra-aula, seppur all’interno di un’attività di apprendimento strutturato, potenzi la motivazione: in tale contesto vista, movimento, tatto, azione, ma, aggiungiamo noi, anche olfatto e gusto, possono creare molti stimoli. Ricordiamo in questa sede uno studio nel quale John M. Henshaw (2012) sostiene che i cinque sensi siano in realtà dieci, dunque l’importanza dell’esposizione dei sensi in un ambiente di apprendimento fuori dell’aula. L’attività fuori aula, perciò, implica una stretta correlazione con l’attività in aula, non sono disgiunte ma in continuo rinvio una all’altra. Il coinvolgimento degli studenti in orario extrascolastico al di fuori dell’aula, ma con mete e obiettivi e contenuti all’interno di un percorso didattico programmato, deve prevedere attività molto motivanti. Le ricadute di attività fuori aula ben strutturate sono ricadute ottime per l’apprendimento della lingua L2/LS, in quanto fuori aula si possono valorizzare sia percorsi attinenti a temi di cultura quotidiana, ma anche temi di cultura profonda, di civiltà e di comunicazione interculturale. La dimensione culturale

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profonda, di civiltà e di comunicazione interculturale, è una dimensione da progettare dentro e fuori aula. La terza parte riguarda attività svolte in autonomia in piccoli gruppi di studenti che si scelgono tra di loro e sull’argomento affrontato nelle prime due fasi. Essa può consistere in un lavoro da svolgere in un lasso di tempo predefinito e il prodotto verrà concordato con l’insegnante e poi svolto con i mezzi e le tecnologie che gli studenti sceglieranno, suddividendosi i compiti nel gruppo. Questo lavoro potrà valere loro come voto, come credito o rimesso in gioco condividendolo con gli altri studenti in classe o in una piattaforma più estesa. Questa ultima fase: x favorisce processi inferenziali e recupero delle conoscenze sviluppate nelle prime due fasi, facilitando la memorizzazione, come dice Pallotti (2000: 165), “se un determinato contenuto è stato oggetto di varie operazioni analizzato, riassunto, trasformato – le sue tracce in memoria saranno più profonde rispetto a quelle lasciate da un’esposizione passiva”; x avviene alla fine di un percorso e in autonomia e dunque lo studente dovrebbe aver sviluppato la convinzione di possedere la capacità per svolgere il compito, e con un grado di sicurezza sociale nei confronti dei suoi compagni di gruppo; x si tratta di un lavoro in piccoli gruppi di studenti che si scelgono liberamente tra loro, questo lavoro aumenta la possibilità di dialogo e condivisione sia reale che virtuale, se lavorano in presenza o via web, con la finalità di eseguire il compito in cooperazione e collaborazione. Il docente deve tenere le fila di tutte e tre le fasi senza rinunciare al suo ruolo, ma integrandolo man mano con le situazioni. Perciò, non solo insegnante ma anche regista di tutte le attività e promotore interculturale sia all’interno dell’aula con gli studenti sia fuori aula. Così come il docente interagisce con gli studenti e li interfaccia con lingua e cultura in aula, così farà anche fuori aula con una particolare attenzione nel mediare con possibili input negativi. Le attività fuori aula così strutturate in un percorso didattico programmato hanno innumerevoli ricadute positive sull’apprendimento ma vorremmo qui sottolineare quella parte della competenza linguistica rappresentata dal lessico. L’arricchimento del lessico, così difficile da raggiungere come obiettivo in aula per la scarsa attenzione che vi dedicano talvolta i

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manuali, è un obiettivo possibile quando vi si aggiunge una attività fuori aula in cui l’esposizione al lessico è più reale e concreta. In sede di attività fuori aula il lessico ricettivo, frutto del processo di riconoscimento e comprensione in attività di lettura o ascolto, e il lessico produttivo (produrre un dato concetto attraverso abilità produttive, scrivere o parlare) vengono potenziati enormemente rispetto alla sola attività in aula. Potenziamento che viene poi messo ulteriormente in pratica nella terza a ultima attività del percorso didattico. Le attività extra aula così strutturate nell’insegnamento della lingua si pongono in un’ottica di facilitazione dell’apprendimento grazie al contesto diversificato ricco di stimoli motivanti. Nel complesso lavorare con una Unità di Apprendimento che implichi anche una attività fuori aula è una strategia che supporta la Classe ad Abilità Differenziate (Caon 2006), sia da un punto di vista della strutturazione dell’attività stessa che in quello della sua gestione in quanto dà la possibilità: x di pensare e strutturare una attività extra aula attraverso l’uso di stimoli multisensoriali abbinati al linguaggio, con strutture che presentano molte frasi o concetti riformulati con uso di parole diverse, con un repertorio di attività alternative per interessi diversi o abilità diverse, con la personalizzazione di alcune attività sugli studenti, con la possibilità di elaborare attività non solamente linguistiche e di usare il sillabo a profondità diverse, con l’uso di diversi codici; x di gestire la classe multilivello valorizzando le abilità di ognuno attraverso una organizzazione flessibile della classe e una metodologia didattica diversa. I luoghi di una città dunque possono essere sede di una didattica esperienziale e luogo motivazionale. Perché la città è un luogo di incontro, in cui arte, letteratura, cinema, teatro, cucina storia, chimica, architettura, economia danno adito a motivazione, apprendimento, lingua e cultura. Il luogo fisico che è la città apre a una didattica esperienziale in quanto tutte le discipline elencate danno un ancoraggio reale per l’apprendimento linguistico. Con le attività fuori aula si cerca, attraverso varie tecniche glottodidattiche, modelli operativi e tecnologie, di entrare in contatto con una città, e dunque con un Paese: l’insegnamento linguistico attraverso i luoghi che una città mette a disposizione diviene così non solo applicazione alla lingua, ma anche tramite di interculturalità e formatore di

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identità. I luoghi, virtuali o reali, inoltre, riguardano anche il concetto di comunità: tutti noi facciamo parte di molte comunità reali o virtuali, per nascita o per scelta. L’importanza di creare comunità di apprendimento della lingua italiana, comunità in cui, come suggerisce Cecchini (2001: 307): le interazioni e le azioni che in essa si producono generino conoscenza e informazioni e producano risultati [...]. Lo spazio (ambiente) di comunicazione che si costituisce conta per il processo di apprendimento.

Il luogo, il dove reale o virtuale o entrambi al contempo, in cui creare una forte comunità di apprendimento della lingua italiana è importante: un luogo virtuale ma al contempo reale, fatto di lingua e di cultura apprese attraverso letteratura e scienze e arti varie. I luoghi di appartenenza oggi non sono più, come l’identità, scolpiti dentro di noi, non sono più immutabili per tutta la vita, anzi sono negoziabili e revocabili. Questi sono i temi cari a Zigmunt Bauman ed evidenziano quanto il luogo oggi sia una scelta, una decisione in base ai passi che si intraprendono nella vita. In sede di apprendimento linguistico va evidenziato che il luogo è e deve essere anche il luogo di apprendimento a cui legare una comunità di apprendimento perché al luogo viene affidato il sentimento di appartenenza. Se una città, in quanto luogo di apprendimento di una comunità di apprendimento, offre, attraverso una rete di possibilità formate da strutture, docenti, materiali, luoghi eccetera, una affidabilità scientifica e umana – come si conviene alla didattica umanistica – allora può divenire uno dei luoghi di formazione e di identità del discente: un luogo motivazionale. Abbiamo scelto la tecnologia ipermediale per le attività in aula che fanno da supporto alle attività fuori aula, in quanto pensiamo che un ipermedia possa fare da ponte tra le pratiche d’uso delle tecnologie in tempi digitali e le pratiche formative della scuola. Inoltre la motivazione va cercata e perseguita negli strumenti della quotidianità degli studenti di oggi: le tecnologie digitali e i luoghi della città. L’ipermedia nell’insegnamento linguistico è un’evoluzione dell’ipertesto: nell’ipermedia le possibilità dell’ipertesto vengono potenziate. La tecnologia ipermediale comprende testo ma anche immagini, suoni, rinvii a pagine web, e molto altro, in modo non lineare; apre alla multicodicalità attraverso lessìe non solo alfabetiche ma anche visuali, uditive o multisensoriali; permette approcci interdisciplinari; consente esplorazione nell’apprendimento – learning by experience; garantisce spazio per lavoro autonomo o di gruppo dove caricare contenuti

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comunicativi al di fuori del percorso di classe; dà la possibilità di pensare e strutturare l’ipermedia per una classe ad abilità differenziate CAD. L’ipermedia può divenire dunque un ponte tra le pratiche d’uso delle tecnologie dei nativi in epoca digitale e le pratiche formative tradizionali della scuola. Bisogna sottolineare il fatto che oggi per lo più si ha a che fare con studenti “multialfabeti”, come scrive Umberto Margiotta (1997), che sanno avvalersi di più linguaggi così da utilizzare in maniera proficua le risorse messe a disposizione dalle nuove tecnologie. Sul piano dell’apprendimento linguistico un percorso didattico ideato attraverso ipermedia e città con una parte dedicata alle attività fuori aula, fornisce contesti di apprendimento significativi grazie alla differenziazione della proposta, non solo pagina scritta ma anche immagini, interviste video testi su web, e presenza dei luoghi della città: un’integrazione di più codici. Venezia come luogo reale e letterario su cui far nascere la nostra proposta di ipermedia è luogo ideale grazie alla sua conformazione – assenza di strade normalmente caratterizzate e di veicoli su strada, stratificazione della storia in luoghi da secoli immutati eccetera – si presta a una didattica esperienziale: si può entrare nella storia e nella geografia della città semplicemente camminandoci in tutti i suoi luoghi. La storia della città lagunare tuttavia preserva immutate da secoli storie e leggende legate a molte discipline, infatti è per eccellenza luogo di incontro, in cui arte letteratura, cinema, teatro, cucina, storia, chimica, architettura, poesia, economia, stimolano la curiosità e la motivazione all’apprendimento della lingua e della cultura. La città in oggetto dunque si apre a una didattica attraverso ipermedia, in quanto tutte le discipline elencate danno un ancoraggio all’apprendimento linguistico attraverso la realtà concreta. In fase di insegnamento linguistico, con varie tecniche glottodidattiche, modelli operativi e tecnologie, si può entrare in contatto con una città, e dunque con un Paese. L’insegnamento linguistico attraverso ipermedia diviene così non solo applicazione alla lingua, ma anche tramite di interculturalità e formatore di identità. Le varie esperienze svolte in questi anni al CLA in ambito di percorsi comprendenti attività fuori aula ci hanno dunque motivati ad analizzare i riscontri ottenuti, come abbiamo sin qui fatto, e a propendere per una integrazione delle risorse, delle strategie e delle tecnologie nell’insegnamento della L2.

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Titone R. 1999. Problemi di psicopedagogia del linguaggio. Dalla psicolinguistica alla glottodidattica. Perugia: Guerra. Torresan P. 2008. Intelligenza e didattica delle lingue. Bologna: EMI. Toscano A. 2012. Letteratura, città, web. In F. Caon / G. Serragiotto (a cura di), Tecnologia e didattica delle lingue. Torino: UTET Università: 251-259.

CONTRIBUTORS

ROBIN ANDERSON has worked in the field of English as a Second Language for over 30 years and has taught and trained teachers in the UK, Portugal, Italy and China where he was Senior English Language Specialist for the British Government’s Overseas Development Agency. He is the author of five books: Studying Business in English, Business Writing Skills, First Insights into Business – Vocabulary in Context, Working with Economic and Business English and Practical Business Skills. He has published articles on a number of aspects of applied linguistics, particularly in the field of text discourse analysis and English for Specific Academic Purposes. Currently he is involved in research with colleagues in Japan into motivation in English language learners at the tertiary level of education and has given papers and written articles concerning this research. He works as a ‘ricercatore’ in the Faculty of Economics in the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca. CRISTINA ARIZZI is Assistant Professor in English language and translation at the University of Messina specialising in text and discourse analysis with a special focus on websites in publications such as “Textual complexity in websites for children: barriers and affordances” (in press) and editorship of the Medical CLIL subsection in Cambria et al. Web Genres and Web Tools, Como: IBIS. Her long-standing interests in American society have led to presentations in international conferences and publications: “The Living Room Candidate: A multimodal and cultural analysis of a web archive” in M. Cambria et al.; “Social networks and political campaigns: The 2012 American Presidential Elections” in Montagna (ed.), Readings in Intersemiosis and Multimedia, Como: IBIS. She has published a monograph, La retorica della democrazia in Herman Melville (Catania: Prova d’Autore), and is currently completing a volume on American presidential inaugural addresses and an article on personal, collective and national identities in political discourse. TERESINA BARBERO was one of the first teachers to investigate CLIL and to address CLIL issues in the Italian context. She has been involved in local projects (Lingue, culture e scienze, l’uso veicolare della lingua straniera in apprendimenti scientifici, 2001 e 2002), national projects

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(progetto E-CLIL, MIUR 2012, Gruppo nazionale CLIL, 2010, CLIL in action, MIUR and ENI 2011) and European CLIL-related projects (CLILCOM, LICI, AECLIL, CROCRE). She has collaborated as a teacher trainer with the Universities of Turin, Genoa, Trento and Viterbo, and is the author of a number of national and international publications about CLIL. RITA BENNETT has taught English to speakers of other languages for 21 years mainly in Italy but also in England. The University of Salento, where she worked for 11 years, recently awarded her a PhD in ELF, English as a Lingua Franca, with a focus on English as a medium of instruction for university students with other first languages. She also has a Masters in TEFL and Applied Linguistics from King’s College London (2001). As well as general language teaching, her current interests include English for Special and Academic Purposes, language testing and translation. JULIA BOYD graduated with Joint Honours from the Schools of Social Studies and European Languages at the University of East Anglia (UK). She has taught in Germany and Italy in numerous contexts including EAP, ESP, CLIL, translation and intercultural mediation. At present she teaches at the Università del Salento in the Faculty of Languages and as a contract professor for Political Science and International Relations. Her areas of research include CLIL, ELF, translation and PS interpreting. Her publications include “The role of the interpreter for public services in the province of Lecce” (2014) and “Translation problems of intermediate learners of English in using bilingual dictionaries” (2013). MARIA CARIA works as part of the technical team at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Calabria (since 2000), working as an Administrator of Academic Learning Platforms and VLE/PLE (Intelligent Web Teacher, Moodle, ELEA and PERLE-UNICAL), and also as a Technical Tutor in the e-learning projects “Virtual classroom for Italian and Albanian in e-Tandem”, “Virtual classroom for Chinese”. For the last 10 years she has been a Technical Consultant in the design of courseware with the Consortium for Distance University. She holds a Master’s Degree in Mathematics at the University of Calabria, a post-graduate degree in new digital skills as well as in Open Education, Social e Mobile Learning from the University of Florence. She is currently involved in the preparation of advanced courses in “New didactic methodologies in the Secondary School” and “Teaching Professionalism”, and is an expert consultant in innovative interactive learning.

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THOMAS CHRISTIANSEN has taught in various positions at various universities in Apulia (Italy), the UK, and Poland. In 2001, he completed his PhD at Salford (UK). He has researched into various areas of linguistics including systemic linguistics and functional grammar, varieties of English, ELF, teaching English, language testing, and analysis of different corpora. Since 2006, he has been a full-time researcher and adjunct professor in English Language and Translation at the Università del Salento (Italy). He has presented papers at many national and international conferences including Austria, Denmark, Italy, Finland, Turkey, and the UK. He has authored many articles and three books, most recently Cohesion: A Discourse Perspective (Peter Lang, 2011). LOIS CLEGG holds a BA Hons and PGCE from London University and an MSc in Teaching English from Aston University, UK. She teaches English at the University of Parma, Italy, and is currently employed on various degree courses in the Departments of Economics, Pharmacy, Food Science and Engineering. She has taught CLIL methodology and language courses organized by secondary schools for subject teachers, and at Parma University has collaborated in CLIL training of language degree course students. She has published school textbooks for use in CLIL in secondary schools. Her other interests include written academic English and the language of economics. LIS CONDE is a Guatemalan national with a Master’s degree in Media Education from the University of Calabria. She is an eLearning designer specializing in the creation of online products based on Blended Learning methodology and Learning by Doing. She also has experience with platform management and course content creation with the objective of enhancing motivation through interactive, multimedia activities. Currently Lis is a graduate student at the University of Melbourne in Australia, doing research on how to standardize and simplify the creation of resources and virtual communities based on Instructional Design. She aims to develop a MOOC where educational professionals can learn to create their own resources, share their activities, receive training, support, and network, thus addressing a critical lack of training and resources in countries such as Guatemala, and thereby making education more democratic and effective. MICHAEL CRONIN, originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland, is a research fellow in English Language and Translation at the Department of Languages and Education at the University of Calabria. He graduated in

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English at Cambridge University and completed his MA and DPhil studies at the University of Ulster. He has been living and working in Italy for 27 years and teaches English and Translation at the University of Calabria in a number of degree courses including Law, Tourism, Business Administration, Modern Languages and Language Mediation. His research interests regard literary translation, discourse analysis, language and power with specific regard to the law, and e-learning and digital platforms with reference to the development of course materials and learning objects for English. ADRIANA TERESA DAMASCELLI is an Adjunct Associate Professor and holds a PhD in English Language. She carries out research in the use of professional software and tools of analysis for language teaching and learning, especially in English, and in particular for Corpus Linguistics and Computer Assisted Translation in Master degree courses. She is involved in the teacher training programme for CLIL methodology for secondary school teachers where she teaches and experiments with the application of CLIL methodology in the scientific disciplines. She is the author of several articles on Corpus Linguistics, CLIL, and ESP. She currently works in the University Language Centre at the University of Turin where she coordinates various English language teaching programmes. CLAUDIA D’ESTE holds a degree in foreign languages (English and French) from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (1999), and an MA in Applied Linguistics (Language Testing) from the University of Lancaster (2009). Since 2005 she has worked as a language technician at the Ca’ Foscari University of the Venice Language Centre. Her research interests focus on language assessment, test development and validation. She has taken part in many national and international conferences in this field. She was involved in the University of Venice “English B1 entry test” project. Her recent work has been on providing fair and valid foreign language testing for disabled students and students with Specific Learning Difficulties. ISABELLE DOTAN (PhD) is a lecturer of French Language (FLE) and French Civilization (Historical and Contemporary Trends of French Culture) at Bar Ilan University, Israel. Her current research interests include French Didactics (in ICT and Hebrew environment and French Prosody for FLE learners). She wrote a PhD thesis on the writing of pain in contemporary Francophone literature. She is also a translator of poetry

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from Hebrew and English to French, and has worked on several collections and anthologies. GIULIANA FIORENTINO is an associate professor in Linguistics at the University of Molise. Her main interests cover Italian syntax both from a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. She adopts a sociolinguistic approach to language use, especially in comparing spoken and written language. Recently she has focused on the analysis of language in computer-mediated- communication. She is also involved in educational research, evaluating methods in language teaching and in learning with technological devices. She has published several articles both in Italian and in English contributing to international journals and volumes. She is the author of a volume on the syntax of relative clauses (1999) and of a volume on web writing (2013). She has edited the book entitled Romance Objects which appeared in the Mouton De Gruyter series Empirical Approaches to Language Typology (2003). She has also edited a monograph on nominalizations with Bernard Comrie published as a special issue of the Italian Journal of Linguistics (2011). STEFANIA FIRETTO is from Catanzaro, Italy. She has a Master´s degree in Computational Humanistic Disciplines. Her Master's thesis is devoted to the presentation of the design and implementation of an online course in English. She is currently the eTutor for the platform (PerLE) at the Department of Languages and Education at the University of Calabria. Her job is to help students improve their digital skills using a wide array of web-tools. She has experience with content and activities creation for student learning. She works on graphics design, blog creation and wiki editing, and also has experience with audio and video editing. MICHELA GIORDANO (MA Linguistics, California State University, Long Beach) is a Researcher and Lecturer in English Language and Translation at the University of Cagliari. Her research activity and major publications to date lie mainly in applied linguistics, ESP teaching methodology, discourse and genre analysis applied to academic, political and legal discourse. Her recent publications include: “K case briefs in American Law Schools: a genre-based analysis”, in C. Berkenkotter, V.K. Bhatia and M. Gotti (eds.), Insights into Academic Genres (2012); 18 Million Cracks in the Glass Ceiling. Language, Gender and Power in Hillary R. Clinton’s Political Rhetoric (2012); “Participants' relationship in ODR: legal discourse as social practice”, in C. Williams and G. Tessuto (eds.), Language in the Negotiation of Justice. Contexts, Issues and

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Applications, co-author O. Denti (2013); “Trial proceeding transcripts as genre: decontextualization and recontextualization” in P. Evangelisti Allori, J. Bateman and V.K. Bhatia (eds.), Evolution in Genre. Emergence, Variation, Multimodality (2014). PETER HOWARTH is Deputy Director of the Language Centre at the University of Leeds, which teaches English and about 10 foreign languages as well as providing extensive resources for independent language learners. His background is in the teaching of English as a Foreign Language, working in Europe and Malaysia. He has worked in higher education for 30 years, teaching English for Academic Purposes and managing technological resources, and has visited numerous countries on language-teaching related consultancies, particularly in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He has a PhD in English linguistics and has taught and examined Linguistics and English Language Teaching at Masters and PhD level. He has published in the areas of English phraseology and language learning technology since 1986. He was Chair of AULC (the Association of University Language Centres (UK and Ireland)) from 2008 until May 2014 and is now Secretary General of CercleS. DEIRDRE KANTZ, a graduate of the Scuola per Interpreti e Traduttori, University of Trieste, works as a collaboratore esperto linguistico in the University of Pavia, specializing in biomedical English; she lectures at the University of Genoa in courses related to pharmacy and specialized translation. Her publications and presentations in international congresses have investigated specialized areas of multimodal syllabus design in biomedical contexts such as multimodality, student-led corpus construction and subtitling. Recent publications include “Medical CLIL (Part III): How the mind works” in M. Cambria et al., Web Genres and Web Tools, Como: Ibis; “Multimodal Subtitling: A Medical Perspective” in Y. Gambier et al., Subtitles and Language Learning. Principles, Strategies and Practical Experiences, Bern: Peter Lang; and (with A. Baldry) “New dawns and new identities for multimodality: Public information films in The National Archives”, in N. Vasta and C. CaldasCoulthard (eds.), Identity Construction and Positioning in Discourse and Society, Textus, XXII:1. ANNIKKI KOSKENSALO is professor of the Didactics of Foreign Languages at the Faculty of Education of the University of Turku, appointed in 1997. She was vice-dean from 2001 to 2006. Previously she

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worked as a lecturer-teacher at the Teacher Training school in Tampere and as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Teacher Education in Turku in 1988-1989. In 1992 she was appointed Lecturer in the Didactics of German at the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Helsinki. In 1995 she was appointed Professor of German at the University of Joensuu. She has written six monographs and is the editor of three books. She has written about 100 articles in the field of language learning. We also find among her publications articles on text linguistics and the language of advertising. She has been on several research visits to Germany and Austria and has participated in many international conferences. GISELLA LANGE’ is a Foreign Languages Inspector with the Italian Ministry of Education, advising on internationalization and foreign languages. She is currently involved in National Groups organized by the Ministry of Education on Primary teacher training, National Guidelines and CLIL. A researcher, writer and consultant on issues relating to Foreiginn Language teaching, curriculum development and intercultural education, she has a vast experience of working on culture and language learning solutions and web-based teacher training. An expert within the European Commission and the Council of Europe, the thematic groups, studies and projects she has been involved with include “Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe 2012” (Italian expert for Eurydice study); the “European Language Portfolio” (member of the CoE Validation Committee and IMPEL project of ECML in Graz), the “Autobiography for Intercultural Encounters” (co-translator of the CoE document into Italian), and various CLIL projects (SUBJECT PROJECTS, TIE-CLIL, CLILCOM, CLIL Consortium, CLIL Cascade Network, LICI, LACE, PROMICE). LUISELLA LEONZINI is a Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Trieste (Department of Humanities and Department of Economics, Business, Mathematics and Statistics). As a PhD student (Lancaster University) she is examining the verbal and visual metaphorical expressions used by The Economist to cover the economic and financial issue of the euro since its inception up to the crisis which hit the Eurozone currency between 2009 and 2012. Her previous publications include studies in the field of teaching English as a Foreign Language, with a specific interest in the use of ELP as a tool to build proficient language learning. She has also examined the power of extensive reading to develop intensive reading skills and investigated the approach of the CLIL project

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in secondary school to improve language skills. Her recent research projects have focused on corpus linguistics, discourse and metaphor monomodal and multimodal analysis in the language of economics. ANNA LOIACONO is currently Associate Professor in Medical Departments of the Universities of Bari and Foggia. She has vast experience in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in the biomedical sector. With over 50 publications, her most recent volumes in medical communication include The Medical Alphabet. Vol 1. Andria: Matarrese; A Virtual Hospital For Medical English (Como: IBIS) and Medical Communication: Systems and Genres (Como: IBIS); with G. Iamartino and K. Grego she edited Teaching Medical English: Methods and Models (Monza: Polimetrica). Her most recent articles include “Medical CLIL (Part IV): How the brain works”; “Medical Genres in Socio-political Communication: Overcoming gaps” in M. Cambria et al., Web Genres and Web Tools (Como: IBIS); and “The language of fear: pandemics and their cultural impact” (forthcoming). Her current commitment is to developing medical communication projects in Italy and Europe that promote international qualifications and training in medical English. GERALDINE LUDBROOK is a researcher in English Language and Linguistics at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Lancaster University (UK). She has taken part in numerous national and international testing research projects. Her recent research focuses on fair and valid foreign language testing for students with dyslexia and related specific learning difficulties. ELENA MANCA is researcher and lecturer at the Department of Humanities, University of Salento (Lecce, Italy). She holds a PhD in English Language and Translation (supervisor: Elena Tognini Bonelli) from the University of Lecce. She teaches English Language and Translation on a BA course in Linguistic Mediation. Her main research interests are Corpus Linguistics and the study of meaning, Corpus Linguistics and Intercultural Studies applied to translation and contrastive analysis, special languages with particular attention to the language of tourism, the use of new technologies in language teaching and audiovisual translation. GILLIAN MANSFIELD is Associate Professor of English language and translation at the University of Parma. Her present research interests

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include wordplay in media texts, the use of corpus linguistics in language learning awareness, cultural identity in global advertising and technologyenhanced collaborative language learning. At present, she is taking part in a 3-year project at her university on the implementation of e-learning for languages. She has been both treasurer and secretary of AICLU (Associazione Italiana dei Centri Linguistici Universitari). From September 2008 to September 2012 she was Secretary General of CercleS (European Confederation of Language Centres in Higher Education) after which she was elected (2012) and re-elected President in 2014. In her capacity as president she is also, with David Little, Editor-in-Chief of the CercleS academic journal Language Learning in Higher Education. DENISE MILIZIA is a Researcher in English Language and Translation at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro”, Italy. Her research activity and major publications to date lie in applied linguistics, political phraseology across American, English and Italian cultures, legal phraseology in the documents of the European Union, ESP teaching methodology and popularization discourse, both in spoken and written political corpora. Her recent publications include Phraseology in Political Discourse. A corpus linguistic approach in the classroom (2012); “Phrasal verbs and phrasal units: political corpora within the walls of the classroom” (2013), in Corpora in Specialized Communication, CERLIS Series; “Tracking language change in the American government: keys in the old and new administrations” (2013), in The Three Ways of Globalization, Cambridge Scholars; “In, out, or half way? The European attitude in the speeches of British leaders” (2014), in Lingue e Linguaggi, vol. 11. In her recent talks, she has presented the following papers: “Specialized discourse vs popularized discourse: the UK and the European Union” (2014); “A bilingual comparable analysis: the European Union in the speeches of British and Italian leaders” (2014), and “Discourse and politics in Britain: politicians and the media on Europe” (2015). She is assistant editor of the journal ESP Across Cultures. MARGHERITA PELLERITI started teaching English as a Second Language both at University Language Centres and schools after graduating cum laude in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures. Her nine-year experience as a certified teacher ended when she started working on a permanent job at the Language Centre of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. Her teaching experience also led to the publication as co-author of two English coursebooks for school students, Links 1 (2009) and Links 2 (2009), published by Mondadori for English.

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At the Language Centre of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia she works as a technical staff member. Her main activities include language advising with the help of self-access facilities and language testing, in particular computer-based. She has also given talks both at national and international conferences and seminars. One of these talks – Le competenze linguistiche dello studente dell’infermieristica: una nuova prova – was published in 2014, while other talks will shortly be published as forthcoming papers. SANDRA PETRONI is a senior lecturer and teaches English Language and Linguistics at the Department of Humanities of the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” on the Languages in the Information Society Degree Course. She is a member of various national and international scientific committees and associations. She has participated in various international conferences. She is also the author of several research articles and two books, Self-Study. La multimedialità e l'apprendimento della lingua inglese nel nuovo sistema universitario italiano (2004) and Language in the Multimodal Web Domain (2011). Her research fields are multimodality, specialized discourse (in particular information and communication technology (ICT) discourse), second language learning and psycholinguistics. SELENE RESCIO grew up in Lecce where she attended the Università del Salento for her undergraduate degree. After cultivating an interest in language teaching and language disorders she went to the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice where she took a Master degree in Language Sciences, focusing on Modern Language Teaching. Her thesis was on Dyslexia and foreign language learning in Italian primary schools. She also attended a specialization course on Foreign Languages and Dyslexia at the Ca’ Foscari DEAL research centre. During her master courses she spent six months as an Erasmus student at the UvA University of Amsterdam. In February 2014 she did a Leonardo internship in Lode Heath School in Solihull (UK) as a teacher assistant. Her research interests are in glottodidactics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, dyslexia and acquisition of L2. ROSALBA RIZZO is Assistant Professor in English language and translation at the University of Messina specializing in recent years in newspaper discourse. Her publications include “Multimodal and Intercultural Analysis of Online Newspapers” in M. Cambria et al., Web Genres and Web Tools (Como: IBIS) and a volume, currently in press,

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with M. Cambria on The Multimodal Analysis of Online Newspapers: Project Work for Students in Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences, London: Equinox. Following her PhD studies, she worked on syllabus design and learning strategies described in her volume Multimodal and Multimedia Aspects of English Language Teaching and Studies in Italian Universities: An e-learning approach, Como: IBIS. With M.G. Sindoni, she has published “Learning and Assessment Procedures at the University of Messina Language Centre (Italy): An Integrated Approach”, Journal of Education, Informatics, and Cybernetics. She has presented papers at many international events and participated in various Italian national research (PRIN) projects. ANILA RUTH SCOTT-MONKHOUSE teaches English as a Foreign Language at Parma University (Italy), and is an examiner for Cambridge English Language Assessment. She has been involved in teacher training in Italy and the Czech Republic, and has cooperated with the European College of Parma in the Diploma for Advanced European Studies. Since 2006 she has been working within the national post-graduate project EFLIT (English for Law and International Transactions), launched by Parma University’s Department of Law. Her interests lie in analysing the needs of learners of English, and bridging the gap between the classroom and the real world through learner training and by applying Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences in the field of language teaching. MARY ELLEN TOFFLE, M.I.M., is currently Assistant Professor of English Language and Translation in the Department of Juridical Science and Institutional History at the University of Messina, Sicily. She teaches CLIL courses in Cross-Cultural Communication in various degree programs: Social Services, Psychology, International Relations, Economics and Management. She is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Pavia, where she teaches CLIL-based Medical Intercultural Competence. Her research areas include multimodal studies with a focus on the interaction of language and culture in Internet media as well as socio-linguistic studies of language in emergency situations. She is founder and president of California Global Education, a non-profit organization dedicated to human development and research. She is a key member of a research team in transcultural psychology for immigrant counselling at the Fondazione Cecchini Pace in Milan. She has worked in Latin America, North America, Europe and the United Arab Emirates and speaks five languages.

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ANNA TOSCANO is an Expert Italian Language Collaborator at the Venice-based University Ca ' Foscari. She holds a PhD in Language Sciences. Her area of research is Italian as a second language or foreign language (L2 / LS), foreign languages, cultural mediation, multimedia and hypermedia in the language classroom. Her numerous publications include L’italiano a stranieri nei centri linguistici universitari, published by Guerra Edizioni, 2010 (co-editor). MARIE-BERTHE VITTOZ is full professor of French at the Modern Languages Department at Turin University. She teaches in the undergraduate programmes and the Masters Programme in Foreign Languages for International Communication. Since 2004 she has been the coordinator of the binational degree programme in Languages, Law and Management at the Universities of Lyon III and Turin and is deeply committed to and involved in the internationalization process, organizing multiple Erasmus exchange programmes in France and Belgium. She is Editor-in-Chief of Synergies Italie, a journal published by the GERFLINT group. She is also director of the Turin University Language Centre where she has developed, together with traditional language teaching, computeraided and e-learning programmes, teacher training courses (CLIL) and international programmes for teaching Italian as a foreign language. She is Academic Director of the Comitato Torino Università Estate (TUE) which organizes a School of Italian Language and Culture available to both university students and the general public (www.italianoperstranieri. unito.it). A member of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques since 1999, she was nominated Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 2010 for her activities in promoting French language and culture in the Piedmont region. Her research interests include neologisms in contemporary French, didactics and lexical methodologies for French language teaching, linguistic variations, field-specific discourse, phraseology, the history of orthography, intercultural communication in management, binational degree programmes and university language centres. CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS is full professor of English Language and Linguistics at the Department of Law of Foggia University where he is also Head of the University Language Centre. He has published extensively in the field of legal English. Besides his monographic work Tradition and Change in Legal English: Verbal Constructions in Prescriptive Texts (2005), he has co-edited with Maurizio Gotti the volume Legal Discourse across Languages and Cultures (2010). He has also co-edited with Ilse Depraetere a volume on future time reference

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which appeared in a special issue of English Language and Linguistics in 2010. He is chief editor of the journal ESP Across Cultures.