SELF-ASSESSMENT OF UPPER SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS’ COMPETENCES AND TEACHING NONLINGUISTIC SUBJECT THROUGH A CLIL APPROACH

In the Italian school system, the compulsory teaching of at least one curriculum discipline in a foreign language through Content and Language Integrated Learning mode (CLIL) (Coyle, Hood, Marsh, 2010) was introduced with the reorganization of the upper secondary school in 2010 (Decrees No 87, 88, 89/2010). Teachers of the non-linguistic disciplines concerned are required to take part in specific training courses carried out by the universities, aimed at acquiring the CLIL methodology. For the academic year 2018/2019, the Department of Languages, Literatures, Intercultural Studies, Education and Psychology (SCIFOPSI) at the University of Florence was entrusted with the realization of three courses in which about 100 upper secondary school teachers in service at high schools, technical and professional institutes participated. This paper presents an empirical survey carried out with a sample. The aim is to bring out self- assessment competences in non-linguistic curricular disciplines teaching (the Italian acronym is DNL) using the CLIL methodology (Danielson, McGreal, 2000). The survey uses a research design with pre-post-test by means of a structured questionnaire (Beraux, Coonan, Frigols-Martin, Mehisto, 2010) administered to teachers at the beginning and at the end of the CLIL methodological courses. The preliminary results refer exclusively to the initial phase of the pre-test. They will be later correlated with the results to highlight the improvement to be pursued using the CLIL methodology, both in disciplinary content and L2 linguistic skills development (Herrarte, Beloqui, 2015; Sercu, 2006). The research has shown the area of competence where teachers’ perception is lower and has indicated the need to further inform training paths to strengthen the theoretical methodological principles and the teaching practices of the CLIL approach.