The Future of Education

Recent language curriculum reforms in the Italian education policy have focused on CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology with great emphasis on the active collaboration between language and content teachers to foster students’ communication and transversal competencies.
This study aims at presenting a two years’ vertical project involving students from different school grades engaged in interdisciplinary CLIL activities as protagonists of their learning. Last year students of a scientific high school in the province of Milan became English teachers and mentors of last year students from nearby middle schools after disciplinary  topics (Art, History, Science, Technology, Social Studies) had been vertically agreed and previously learned by the students playing the role of novice educators. Constant monitoring and supervision were assured in the different phases of the project by both language and content teachers who cooperated as facilitators and in a certain sense learners, too.
By swapping roles our objectives were both pedagogical and linguistic since we wanted to investigate the students’ attitudes towards English learning and communication in this new and reversed CLIL environment.
To achieve our aims both quantitative analyses and questionnaires were adopted which all valued the vertical implementation as a powerful way of promoting motivation and interaction. Our results also proved that being lectured by peers was beneficial to boost students’ speaking skills at all levels and to learn contents more effectively.

Keywords: CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning), Communication, Peer Teaching, Motivation;