This talk illustrates how the ADiBE Focus-Group Interview Protocol made it possible to easily gather qualitative appraisals from more than 90 Italian high school students regarding their bilingual experience in an otherwise very monolingual social reality. Students' voices not only called for changes in instructional strategies, data also revealed students' astute awareness of why and where diversity exists within their classrooms and how this diversity could hinder their learning. More interestingly, students' voices also indicated how diversity could be harnessed to enrich bilingual instruction, to facilitate students' comprehension of content as well as mastery of the CLIL foreign language.
Students bring into classrooms an array of weaknesses, but also a wealth of unique talents, strengths and abilities. Can CLIL harness individual weaknesses and strengths for the good of the whole? By the very fact that CLIL advocates for student-centred, multi-modal, task-based and graduated learning progressions, yes it can (should)! Indeed, when students must collaboratively complete CLIL-tasks so to co-construct knowledge, certain traits which might be considered "weaknesses" in traditional teacher-centred classrooms, become "strengths" within collaborative problem-solving teams: think the introverted artist-type who would be in her element designing the Project-poster or the fidgety socialite who calms down to conduct meaningful interviews for the Project-poster. Whether CLIL classrooms recognize the potential of such diversity depends on the teacher's mindset. In this talk, we present qualitative data from focus-group interviews of 98 students enrolled in the bilingual programme of an Italian upper secondary school.
As more upper-secondary schools "go bilingual", databases collecting students' appraisals of their experiences should prove useful for informing practice. The ADiBE Focus-Group Interview Protocol was used to collect appraisals from students attending a high school in highly monolingual southern Italy. This produced a database of more than 200 commentaries which could be organized into 11 thematic issues. Three themes reported students' positive learning experiences related to improved language competence, personal growth and general satisfaction. In the remaining eight themes, students' voiced ways for improving their bilingual experience. Not surprisingly, students voiced preference for student-centred and more "up-to-date" instructional strategies over traditional teacher-fronted lecturing: group-work; mixed ability groups; mixed modalities; differentiated instructional input; differentiated ways of showing understanding, etc.
This talk will discuss how attention to diversity catalyzes our move towards student-centred learning and the design of all-inclusive bilingual instructional materials and strategies.
