“While other kids were playing and joking together, I kept to myself. And even during class, even though the teachers tried to involve me, I felt as if I was at the bottom of a very deep well: completely alone.”
For thousands of young foreigners like Talal, 10, who arrived in Italy from Egypt a little over a year and a half ago, language is like a huge obstacle that stands in the way of integration.
This barrier does not allow children and young people placed in the Italian school system to interact with classmates or teachers and it isolates them so much both in social and education processes.

Talal’s example is only a drop in a sea of ​​other similar cases and, today more than ever, represents a challenge for the Italian school system.
“My classmates interacted without difficulty with each other or with the teachers. For me, everything was new, inaccessible. I had difficulty expressing myself, I did not understand what they said to me. And that did not allow me to relate”.

As part of a proactive tutoring in schools aimed at managing this important challenge, CELIM’s teachers try to make the integration of students like Talal in the Italian school system less traumatic.
Talal says: “Language facilitation courses have helped me and other children of different nationalities to approach the Italian language and to relate better with our schoolmates, by playing and having fun. Similarly, they have been able to find out about our cultures and the traditions we have left behind. ”
The programme envisages a meeting with the families and a collaboration with teachers aimed at identifying linguistic facilitation patterns and practices and enhancing the children’s characteristics. Children will take part in two-hour weekly meetings for a total period of 10 weeks that also include moments of intercultural meeting for each child and his/her class.

The project benefits individual foreign students as well as the community around them, and its objectives are: learning and using Italian correctly; following children and adolescents so that they feel welcomed and integrated; strengthening the interaction among children of different cultures.

Overview of the Project

The project aims to guarantee that children and young foreign students in primary and secondary school education are given all the necessary tools and skills to achieve full integration within the school context where they are placed.
This is possible by organising effective linguistic facilitation courses that, through games and participatory activities, also involve teachers, family members and the entire classroom of the foreign students who experience particular difficulties in learning the Italian language. This synergy is critical to achieving the project’s objectives.

With a total duration of 10 weeks, the project involves 2 hours a week of language facilitation courses targeting individual students or small groups with similar difficulties in understanding and learning Italian.