Education Support and Inspection Service (ESIS), Wales

Italian is taught in some 25 primary schools across the four LEAs for which ESIS is responsible. Peripatetic teachers supplied and funded by Italian government agencies spend usually one half day per week in each of the schools concerned. Each school organises this curriculum time according to its own priorities: different year groups may be learning Italian, though in all but one case it is pupils in KS2 who are involved.

In some of the Primary schools the teaching is organised on a whole class basis; in others small groups are withdrawn. Schemes of work are designed by the Italian teachers drawing on guidelines drawn up by their government agencies, and in consultation with the Headteacher of each school. The Italian teachers have their own targets to meet in terms of quality and standards of pupil achievement.

Many of the Primary schools involved in this work have links with schools in Italy, and the majority are involved in Comenius projects with these partner schools. Our main objective was, therefore, to forge a closer link between the Comenius project work and the content of the Italian lessons. We hoped that this would both increase motivation for the learning of Italian and help to provide the Comenius project work with a meaningful linguistic component - all too often Comenius project work involving UK schools is conducted entirely through the medium of English.

Italian lessons at Llwynypia Primary school, Mid Glamorgan

A secondary objective was to find ways for the peripatetic Italian teachers to work more closely with the regular class teachers. This was conceived as a two-way process: devising strategies for the class teacher to support and reinforce the work covered in the contact time with the Italian teacher on the one hand, but also aiming at a cross-fertilisation of ideas between the two - all primary teachers in Wales have experience of teaching Welsh as a second language, and many of the teaching strategies for this are comparable to those required for primary MFL. We would hope that in time this process of discussion and collaboration would contribute to the overall policy on literacy and language development.

Our final objective was to maximise the benefit of early learning of Italian for pupils' experience of foreign language learning at secondary school. Few of the pupils who learn Italian at primary school have the opportunity to continue with its study in Year 7, so we wanted to begin to look at ways of incorporating into the Italian lessons generic language learning skills which MFL HODs in secondary school might consider as desirable outcomes.

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