SECOND PROJECT MEETING
The group meets on Sunday
evening for a dinner.
Simonetta
Salacone, headmistress at Iqbal Masih school, welcomes the group.
The
teachers from
Nasa skola (
L.P. Boon (
Iqbal Masih ( Italy) : Simonetta Parenti and Paola Arduini
Základní škola Zlín ( Czech Republic): Vladimira Zakrevská and Alena Červenková
Kauno Stasio Lozoraičio Vidurinė Mokykla ( Lithuania):
Gaiva Janusauskiene,
Angele Baneniene, Jurate Ivanauskiene,
Vida Sinkuviene
Teachers
from each country present their educational system and their school. Pictures,
leaflets, brochures are given around and shared among participants.
The group
discusses the agenda of the week and some changes are approved.
The Italian
teachers present the topics that will be discussed during the seminars:
The group
shortly discusses about
Then the
group examines the structure of the web site
In a short
brainstorming some ideas are shared:
We can
prepare and share among the schools a questionnaire for children about foreign
language lessons asking their opinion. The results will be published on the web
site
We can also
publish children works on the web: drawings, videos, stories and amusing things
like jokes that are similar in all the countries; also pictures from each
school
At 1.30 the
group has lunch in the school canteen; the headmistress of Iqbal Masih joins the group
and explains how the school canteens are organized in
After lunch
the teachers have a coffee break in the garden. Then they can visit all the
school facilities and the labs.
In the
second part of the day teachers meet and discuss some other ideas about activities organization
during this school year:
Tuesday 24th
The
teachers meet in the school with Donatella
Fitzgerald, teachers trainer for Oxford University
Press
First of
all teachers share in a short discussion the situation of the classes of
English in the different countries: numbers of hours, number of pupils in each
class, age of beginning. The average number of pupils in each class is around
The seminar
is about new methods in teaching learning foreign languages, English in this
case. The focus is on CLIL and Story telling
•
CLIL is an acronym for Content and Language
Integrated Learning.
•
Many
primary schools across
•
At
the same time as learning English, the children are learning some science,
history mathematics, art etc.
•
Therefore
CLIL activities develop oral communication skills in meaningful, motivating and
real social situations.
•
The
primary curriculum offers many interesting entry points for CLIL style
activities.
•
Because
of the wide range of topics and the specific subject language for each, CLIL
exposes children to a wider variety of lexical items than a traditional
teaching approach.
Donatella
Fitzgerald illustrates some activities that can be carried on using the books
“Treetops” by Oxford University Press.
It’s not
possible to have a whole lesson in English in the first grades of Primary.
Anyway,
CLIL helps the younger children exposing them to a wider variety of lexical
items than traditional approach.
Storytelling
and CLIL are connected in some ways. They both give children more language
exposure.
The
children always have a silent period in which they just listen to the language.
In this period they absorb language like sponges. Telling them stories,
teachers can also use more English words and expressions.
Some
suggestions about story telling activity:
After this,
the
All the
materials presented seems very interesting for the
teachers.
After this
presentation, the teachers organize groups to plan lessons for Primary classes.
The topic will be Halloween, introducing new words and a short poem.
After
lunch, the teachers in small group organize their lessons in different classes.
At
Wednesday 25th
Morning:
guided visit to the Trajan Forum and Market.
The
teachers meet at the Iqbal Masih building on via Balzani,
to listen to an exhibition of the multicultural chorus of the school “SE.. STA VOCE”
After the
chorus the teachers can enjoy a dinner prepared by the parents of chorus
children. There are typical dishes of the different countries of the choir
members:
Thursday 26th
Meeting at
school; some teachers of the group meet a teacher in a first class. Luca Vitali,
who presents video and IT materials for
learning/teaching English and resources that can be downloaded from Internet for
free.
Meeting
with Professor Marco Brazzoduro, professor of
Sociology at Rome University
The
teachers introduce their schools and their special projects to the Professor.
To this
meeting takes part also Monica Cordova, social operator of the Association Capodarco and two students of the faculty of Psychology who
are doing their training in the school.
Brazzoduro:
integration in Italian school: in
Until the
70s
The illegal usually live in a very poor condition.
Last year
there were 90000 allowed to come this year 137000. The situation is very complicated
.
Illegal
immigrants should be expelled, but it’s quite impossible.
In gypsy
camps 80% of people are illegal, but they are expelled not systematically.
Lots of
well done documents of intents by the Education Bodies but it’s
difficult to apply them in the every day school activity.
This is a
moved forward school, but the majority of schools are closed to these new
issues and needs. The teachers are not professionally prepared with the culture
of reception. The teachers should have tools to integrate and interact with
parents.
There’s a
big road to do in front of us. Immigrants are less of 5% of population, very
few comparing with
In this
school
37 foreign children , 47 Rom coming from an industrial city Kra…They
are Rudari, they moved to
By the law
there are 2 ways of obtaining citizenship: ius sanguinis
or ius soli. The first is related with origin of parents, it
can lasts for generations and the other is related to the place where a person
was born.
He
illustrates the situation of a camp nearby the school :
a horrible situation. The people there come from
In this school 6 years ago he
began a project devoted to study and promoting the integration of Roma children
: their culture is very different and it causes lots of problems. Why for
example they can’t read after 5 years of primary school? The school feels this
problem very deeply.
How to act
to cope with this problem?
There are
meetings with the teachers focused on reporting the observation of Rom children
in
Social
integration among other children and with adults
School
integration is aimed to find different approaches in teaching them. He works also introducing to the
teachers elements of gypsy culture and building a bridge between school and
camps. The parents are very happy when teachers go to the camp
, when a gagč institution go there for a
visit.
The problem
in gypsy culture is not belonging to their culture, but it’s that of a foreign school that
gives to the children different values. Only a minority of them feels that
going to school is useful for them. Majority of them is illiterate, the culture
is oral.
The main
goal is to show that the school is useful. For example gypsy
parents don’t ask anything about school when children are back from school.
The children are not prized or punished for their school marks.
The city
hall has got a project to scholarize the children;
coaches go to the camps in the morning to bring them to school.
Different
communities in gypsy people: Italian gypsies .
The Roman
gypsy are increasing; many Roma people came during the Balcan
war, belonging to
What kind
of jobs they do? Some are legal: they go around and clean the cellars or they
go looking in the bins to find objects to sell.
Problems in
the school: children forget what they have learnt and they don’t attend
regularly the lessons.
Adults in
Roma communities have
got problems with illiteracy facing their daily problems, for example with
official documents,
The parents
have the evidence how much is important to learn to read but they don’t send
children to school. They have to cope with lots of problems with documents.
Can their
condition improve?
One mean is
television because they are learning Italian through Italian TV.
Problems in finding a regular job. Linked to this in
Prejudices against
gypsies are very strong; but the school project in Iqbal Masih is going on,
aimed to integrate children
Simonetta: should the gypsy children attend
English classes or work more in Italian?
The gypsy
children are talented in languages because of their bilingual attitudes and
they use to travel around
In general
the lexis is often poor in all the languages they speak, problems with abstract
concepts.
They can
learn English without passing through Italian
Dana: In
It could be
a good idea in
In Slovakia Gypsy people is more integrated than in
After a
short break, two students of Rome University Sara Lucatelli
and Beatrice Cimini, who are now completing their
training in the school, present their researches on non - mother tongue
children learning Italian.
Sara Lucatelli speaks about
BILINGUISM AND INTERLINGUA
Excerpt from dissertation work
The definitions.
In the 30’S and 50’S it
was thought that whoever speaks two languages in a native way was bilingual.
This kind of person is really rare. After it was thought that bilingual is
someone who can speak
easily two languages. In this area there are so many situations starting from
the perfect bilingualism, spoken by someone native in both communities, to the
passive bilingualism, which is someone who can understand perfectly both
languages, but he speaks just one. The dominant language is the one that the
subject speaks in the most natural and easy way. We can say individual
bilingualism when it’s independent from the society that surrounds the subject,
and we can say social bilingualism when a certain community
use two languages. The simultaneous bilingual is someone who learns two
or more languages from the birth. The consecutive bilingual is someone who at
the beginning learns one language and later he learns another one. The limit is
around 3 years old, as a rule the child starts to gain the first competences of
one language. Coordinate bilingual is someone who learned both languages from
the birth and he keeps them separated in his mind (book and libro, which is a book in Italian, are two
different concepts relating to two different experiences). The composite
bilingual is someone who learned the second language later and he understands
the words using the same meaning of the word from his mother tongue.
Parents and
teachers should encourage the child to speak both languages. So many studies
made in
The Plurilingualism
The context
where the Roma people live is rich and various, composed of the first language
which is the heritage who gives an identification,
related to the affects, to the daily life, to the education of concepts and
values This language is the Romany for most of Roma people. It is also composed
of some linguistic competences of other variety of Romany or other languages
related to the communication with other Roma, or the language of the gagč ( the non – Roma people) for the communication with the major
community, his own level of knowledge depends on the school grade or the local
speech.
Jules Ronjat, a French linguist, was the first to study the
simultaneous learning: he taught his son Louis two languages: French and
German. He found out that to relate each language to one different person helps
his son to learn both languages. Another really important study is the one of Tabouret-Keller which is about of a little girl named Eve,
she is bilingual in a bilingual community: Alsatian and French (even the Roma
are bilingual in a bilingual community). Tabouret-Keller
said that Eve understood that she was speaking two different languages later
than the other bilingual kids. Probably it’s because of the Eve’s different
linguistic context, where the two languages were not so different or related to
two different persons. There are three different way to teach simultaneously
two languages: one person/one language (for example, the mother speaks one
language and the father speaks the other one), one situation/one language (for
example with the mother the child speaks one language and when he is with other
people he speaks another one), one time/one language (in the morning one
language, in the afternoon another one). Usually the child learns the two
languages even without a certain method, but, as it showed the study of Tabouret-Keller, to relate one language to a situation it
helps the child to learn.
The research
The purpose
of the research was to analyse the language of Romany community’s kids, who come in this
school, and to see how the mother tongue and the Roman dialect influence their
Italian interlanguage. At first I analysed the different mistakes that they
made. Mistakes are the different way of interlanguage used by the bilingual
kids when they try to speak a correct Italian. Later I try to explain the
reason why they usually used this mistakes. It’s not
just because of the grammar rules of the mother tongue but it’s also because of
the education and the linguistic rules given by their families. Also I wanted
to see that learning the languages was possible even without a relation with a
different situation. The most spoken language in their family is the Rumanian.
But in the truth there is not a distinction between the situation
when they speak one language or the other one, because sometimes they used to
speak Italian even between them. Anyway we can say that the Rumanian is the
most spoken language where they live and Italian is the most one outside their
camp. In this research I recorded the kids talking about the images in some
books, after I analysed their language and I separated the different mistakes
that they made. With the outcomes of this research I try to see how the
Rumanian and the Roman dialect influence the Italian interlanguage of the
kids. Phonological mistakes are more
than half of the mistakes. Grammatical mistakes are less than the other one.
The reason of grammar mistakes is probably because they extend the grammar of
the Rumanian language to the Italian one, that is
similar.
The twenty
two percent of the mistakes are influenced by the Roman dialect. Even if the
group that I interviewed is not statistically representative, the outcomes are
that the girls are more influenced by the Rumanian language than the boys. The
boys are more influenced by Roman dialect. Probably because of the different
education: girls are more educated in a house life, boys are more
free. The family’s education it’s an important item in the process of
learning one language: it’s important to know how the family is open to the
Italian culture and what languages they speak in their house. The situation of
the bilingual Roma who live in their camp it is so different to the other
bilingual immigrates who live in a monolingual society. The Roma kids are
bilingual in a bilingual community which is inside a monolingual society. We
have to consider that the kids that I interviewed were all born in
The school
should ever encourage the use of mother tongue
After Sara,
Beatrice illustrates shortly the main methods of teaching foreign languages.
After
teenage you can’t learn phonetic ability, so it’s better to start early to
learn languages.
Then she
analyses other factors related with successful learning
:Motivation and Time
One hour
per day should be the perfect
Better
results when the sex of learners and teacher is different.
The group
discusses about the “Format method” like Hocus Lotus method.
Question
about parents : with bilingual parents what’s better
to do?
Not be
confused. It’s normal to confuse language at the beginning. The bilingual
children start to speak later. The best is to divide the situations: for example : One person one language or one situation, one
language, onetime one language.
The best is
to keep both languages, more languages you know better you do. Bilingual people
are usually more advanced and their minds are more open.
After the
Seminar, the group have lunch in the school canteen
and then, guided by Antonietta
Friday 27th
Evaluation
of the week, planning of the year, organization, suggestion and attribution of
the tasks are discussed. We all feel that our working week was productive and
successful.