Multilinguismo, CLIL e innovazione didattica - Libera Università di ...

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wider range of input and experience on the students’ part and also enabling
the Italian students to experience a multilingual environment in their own
country. In addition, using English to communicate was no longer an option,
as in a monolingual EFL class, but a necessity, which obviously fostered
learning and was also cited in the end-of-course questionnaire as a popular
aspect of the course.
During the course students were introduced:
● to the Anglo-American style of academic writing with its “writer responsible”
style, as Hinds puts it, where it is up to the writer to “make clear
and well-organised statements” (1987: 143) and to “go through draft after
draft to come up with a final product” (1987: 145); most of my students
come from a culture where arguably the accepted style is “reader
responsible” i.e. the onus is on the reader to extrapolate the meaning of
what the writer has written;
● to models of academic writing in the social sciences and their features of
academic language, signalling language, style and register;
● to what constitutes plagiarism and how to cite references in the text and
to write a bibliography;
● to critical thinking, to the importance of putting both sides of the argument,
to separating fact from opinion and to using hedging language;
● to presentations using visual aids (e.g. PowerPoint or Prezi), concentrating
not just on the content but also on visual images, voice and body
language.
The students then attempted to put all this information together and produce
two one-thousand word papers and one five-minute presentation in English at
intervals during the course; in addition to my reading and correcting the
papers and offering feedback, the students also peer-reviewed each other’s
first paper and the presentations.
As in the ESP course, student feedback was extremely positive: they were
enthusiastic about how much the course had covered, about being obliged to
speak English, about their degree of participation in the course, about using
peer response and about the usefulness of my and other students’ feedback.
From my point of view, however, a number of problems emerged. Ironically,
forty hours proved to be too short (and I did not even begin to cover writing
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