This contribution presents preliminary results regarding language attitudes towards Italian as a foreign language (L2) among sixth-year primary school pupils, teachers and parents. The study is situated in the German-speaking part of the trilingual (German, Italian, Romansh) canton of Grisons, where Italian has a minority language status and is chosen as the first compulsory foreign language (Ufficio per la scuola popolare e lo sport).
The research is part of a broader project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) which also examines motivation and emotions, alongside attitudes, in order to provide a broad overview of the interrelations between these dimensions across the target groups and to investigate their correlation with the children’s foreign language competence.
The ultimate aim of the project is to generate findings that can enrich discussions on minority language teaching in compulsory education in other contexts across Europe sharing a similar sociolinguistic fabric. Moreover, it aims to contribute to applied research in the field of language education and to support the lively public debate on foreign language learning in Switzerland by providing updated scientific data, currently not available for L2 Italian.
In particular, this contribution will give a detailed overview of common recurring themes about language attitudes towards Italian which emerged for each target group. Such data were collected through three focus groups per target group with five participants each, involving a total of 45 participants coming from different areas (urban, rural, and mountain). This technique is considered to be effective for investigating linguistic attitudes (Hornsby, 2022), here defined as views on the language that refer not only to purely linguistic aspects but also to those pertaining to the relationship between language and society (Artamonova, 2020).
These results were obtained with a qualitative content analysis process through a defined category system (Mayring, 2022). The focus group transcripts were coded using the software MAXQDA (Kuckartz&Rädiker, 2019) adopting a mixed deductive and inductive approach (Kuckartz&Rädiker, 2022).
Overall, the findings show that all three target groups have positive attitudes towards the Italian language, which is appreciated and positively evaluated, for example, in terms of how it sounds. Furthermore, the results suggest that the participants’ awareness of Italian as both a cantonal and national language contributes to its perception as a component of the multilingual identity in the Swiss and Grisons sociolinguistic context.
Moving on to the topics that characterized each target group, the learners expressed their understanding of the value of multilingualism and the general importance of learning and studying foreign languages at school. Within the target group of parents, themes such as a utilitarian view linked to the knowledge of the Italian language and a critical stance on the methods used to teach this subject at school were addressed.
As for the teachers, the focus will be on emerging trends, for example the differences that have been observed in attitudes towards Italian depending on whether this is their native or second language.
In addition to presenting the findings of the qualitative phase of this research project, the purpose here is to provide insights that come from the actors directly involved in the educational process, which could serve as a basis for improving and renewing foreign language teaching practices at school.
References
Artamonova, T. (2020). L2 learners’ language attitudes and their assessment. Foreign Language Annals, 53(4), 807–826.
Hornsby, M. (2022). Focus Groups. In: Kircher, R., Zipp, L. (Ed.), Research Methods in Language Attitudes. Cambridge University Press, 114-128.
Kuckartz, U. & Rädiker, S. (2019). Analyzing Qualitative Data with MAXQDA. Text, Audio, and Video. Springer.
Kuckartz, U., & Rädiker, S. (2022). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Methoden, Praxis, Computerunterstützung. Beltz Juventa.
Mayring, P. (2022). Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken. Beltz Juventa.
Ufficio per la scuola popolare e lo sport. Offerta di lingue nella scuola popolare del Cantone dei Grigioni. https://www.gr.ch/IT/istituzioni/amministrazione/ekud/avs/attivitascolastica/sprachen/Seiten/Sprachenangebot.aspx