The paper presents a teacher training pilot experience carried out within a group of primary school Italian teachers around the theme of multilingualism. Teachers generally show a positive attitude toward diversity and multiculturality (Sordella, 2015), but are not yet familiar with language teaching in a multilingual environment. Teachers still perceive their role in a monolingual dimension, and consider the teaching of Italian as their main and mostly unique goal in language education.
A long-lasting attention to this issue by researchers engaged in the field of teacher training did not succeed in changing teaching practices and beliefs (Duberti, 2019). A change could instead be promoted by bottom-up trainings designed together with the teachers taking into account teachers' practices and the related beliefs. This frequent lack of attention towards stakeholders voices brought the following research to adopt the Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach, a collaborative research process oriented toward social transformation representing a challenge to mainstream research traditions in the social and environmental sciences (Kindon, 2007) to design a training. By providing teachers with appropriate stimuli, (using Focus Group, FG, tool) their experiences and beliefs have been brought out and reused by the researcher as to directly impact the context of the research (Fisher and Ball, 2003).
According with the PAR principles, the training we present has been "tailor-made", on participants voices around their teaching experience in multilingual classes, as they emerged in FG. The subsequent training sessions aimed at challenging these beliefs through workshop-based activities. The sessions have been focussed on (1) intecomprehension and multilingual communication, (2) metalinguistic reasoning and (3) morphological creativity. The sessions encourage teachers' participation, enhance their multilingual resources, offer ideas for pedagogical activities, and promote the discussion around the beliefs already emerged previously.
The analysis of the sessions' data showed some results in terms of changes in attitudes about the following topics: a raise in interest in the sociolinguistic background of the class, the shifting of the valorization of multilingualism in teaching practice from an end to a means, a different attitude toward students' multilingual repertoires. Lastly a further change was recorded in teachers attitudes toward foreign languages: a strong feeling of emotional "block" facing an unknown language was said to be "overcome" by most of the teachers involved in the research.
Departing from this changements triggering a change of perspective and set up a new way of doing grammar in the classroom would be possible.
Duberti, N. (2019). Altre lingue, altri alunni, altri italiani: La scuola e il plurilinguismo in classe. Breve storia di un rapporto difficile. In M. Del Savio, A. Pons, & M. Rivoira (Eds.), Lingue e Migranti nell'area Alpina e Subalpina Occidentale. Edizioni dell'Orso.
Fisher, P. and Ball, T. (2003) 'Tribal participatory research: mechanisms of a collaborative model', American Journal of Community Psychology, 32(3/4): 207–16.
Kindon, S., Pain, R., & Kesby, M. (2007). Participatory action research approaches and methods. Connecting people, participation and place. Abingdon: Routledge, 260.
Sordella, S. (2015). L'educazione plurilingue e gli atteggiamenti degli insegnanti. Italiano LinguaDue, 7(1), 60–110.
