Osservare l’Interlingua is a teacher training and action-research initiative aiming to produce, implement and assess activities for observing pupils' language development and devising relevant educational interventions based on the interlanguage approach. Teachers and researchers collaborate along the entire process. Some empirical results on the effectiveness of this approach are presented.
In the field of language education, teachers face the challenge of putting in place effective strategies to develop language competences for all students, regardless of whether they are using their first, second, or additional language. In order to address these issues, the in-service and pre-service teacher training and action-research initiative Osservare l’Interlingua/Observing Interlanguage has been promoted since 2007 by Reggio Emilia municipality and the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Its main tenet is that effective teaching practices should be grounded in the careful observation of students’ needs, competences, and learning strategies. The project applies the “interlanguage approach” (Pallotti, 2017) to L1 and L2/LX teaching and promotes a communicative orientation in order to make language education truly learner-centered. The project involves 12 primary and 3 middle schools, 28 teachers and 35 classes, with about 650 pupils aged between 6 and 14. Teachers and university researchers collaborate to plan pedagogical actions and monitor their effects, through a systematic analysis of students' productions. The teaching strategies experimented over these 12 years have been organized in a syllabus covering the entire school cycle from grade 1 to 8. The talk will discuss how teachers and researchers collaborate to produce, implement and assess activities to observe the pupils' language development and devise relevant educational interventions based on the interlanguage approach. Some empirical results will be presented, showing the effectiveness of this approach as compared with control classes, with special emphasis on the successful integration of multilingual pupils.
