Interlanguage analysis, formative assessment, and educational experimentation in teacher training

Abstract

This article presents Osservare l’Interlingua (Observing Interlanguage), a project dedicated to teaching to write, which has involved tens of teachers and hundreds of primary and secondary school pupils in Reggio Emilia (Italy) and its province, since 2017. By means of sessions of teacher training and action-research activities carried out with the pupils, the project aims to promote forms of language education, which are effective and inclusive, i.e. proposed to the whole class, without dividing monolingual   and multilingual pupils, native or non-native speakers, with greater or lesser writing abilities. This paper comments on the theoretical-methodological principles that lay at the basis of the project teaching interventions, starting from the very idea of ‘interlanguage’, which gives the project its name: the analysis of each pupil’s written texts and writing strategies is crucial to the scope of designing and implementing pedagogical actions, which are responsive to the students’ actual developmental trajectories. This formative assessment values learning progress, makes it possible to identify the causes of problems and, consequently, allows planning targeted teaching interventions. After describing the project overall organisation and presenting some of its pedagogical interventions, the article summarises the main results obtained by a series of experimental studies that are periodically carried out on children’s oral and written productions, in order to verify the effects of pedagogical actions on their writing skills and on their motivation to write. Both types of study confirm the effectiveness of the project, which receives very positive feedback from all actors involved (teachers, students and families).