Focus on online interaction: a pilot project in Italy

This paper describes a pilot project carried out with a sample of primary, lower secondary and upper secondary schools in Italy, focusing on the Online Interaction and Collaborating in a Group descriptors provided by the CEFR Companion volume (Council of Europe 2018, 2020). Considering the importance of the digital and multimedia dimension in supporting and enhancing the teaching and learning process in 21st-century schools, the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR), in co-operation with the National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research (INDIRE), developed a research project aimed at trialling and observing online interaction among students, either within the same class and/or from different classes and/or different countries, using English as the means of communication and interaction. The pilot project was carried out in nine Italian regions where 20 English language teachers (plus some CLIL subject teachers) were asked to plan and trial activities in their classes involving online CLIL-oriented tasks, preferably within online international projects such as eTwinning, the European programme which is proving to be a very effective medium for task-based and project-based learning. The aim was to enhance the international dimension of the curriculum and foster new ways and new channels of communication. Following the project co-ordinators’ guidelines, offered by both the concept papers and the online meetings, the teachers planned and implemented very creative and innovative tasks facilitating online interactions in English among students. Teachers were also asked to observe and document their students’ interaction, using their favourite tools: note-taking, filming, taking pictures, etc. This informative documentation has been collected and will be disseminated to other teachers and school leaders all over Italy. At the end of the pilot project, the teachers were asked to complete a questionnaire answered by Yes/No or answers on a Likert scale, adapted from a template provided by the Council of Europe. A report in Italian (Benedetti et al. 2020) summarises the results of this survey. Some of the teachers’ comments are also reported and discussed in this chapter. The opportunity to experience interactive and student-centred methods in authentic environments also enabled teachers to gain insight into their own efficacy in using new tools for discussion and interaction. The choice of focusing on the descriptor scales for Online Interaction and Collaborating in a Group of the CEFR Companion volume was considered positively by the teachers because they were offered the opportunity not only to reflect on their students’ learning and communication strategies, but also to strengthen their own teaching and collaborative techniques, thus improving the teaching/learning process. The outcomes of the pilot project will be disseminated (in a printed volume, on the INDIRE platform, face-toface and/or via distance seminars) as an example of how crucial the digital dimension can be in the language learning and teaching agenda