Prep Y1 to Y6 Y7 to Y10 Y11-Y12
A. Indichi quanto è d’accordo con le seguenti affermazioni:
L'assistente linguistico deve essere un esperto nell'insegnamento dell'italiano
L'assistente linguistico deve parlare un italiano corretto A. Per quanti anni ha lavorato con
un assistente linguistico?; B. Studenti con cui lavorava
quando aveva l’assistente linguistico.
35 The third and last part of our study on the assistants regards the general evaluation the teachers have of the program. Besides understanding what the teachers do with the language assistant and how he/she gets involved in the everyday activities, what we are curious to comprehend the teacher’s “ideal” language assistant.. We are happy to see that 74% of the teachers think that the assistant is needed in every school. experience(s) with an assistant are in their opinion, fully satisfactory.
In order to better understand how the teachers consider the assistant we proposed 10 statements to which the teachers should indicate to what extent they agree or disagree. 81% of them fully agree on the fact that the language assistant represents a resource. Only one of our informants completely disagrees with this statement while, 16 % partially agrees. 65% of the teachers agree on the fact that the assistant represents an additional help for the students and specifically, 71% of the informants completely agree on the fact that the assistant represents a big help for improving pronunciation/conversation skills. 65% of our informants also see the assistant as a source of new ideas. Looking more specifically into the relation between assistant and teacher we can surprisingly see that the only 35% of our teacher completely disagree with the statement:
D. Per le seguenti espressioni indichi quanto è d'accordo o non d'accordo: Avere l'assistente linguistico rappresenta una risorsa
Avere l'assistente linguistico è un aiuto per la pronuncia Avere l'assistente linguistico rappresenta un lavoro extra per
l'insegnante
Avere l'assistente linguistico facilita il lavoro dell'insegnante
Avere l'assistente linguistico è utile solo in particolari programmi (es. CLIL)
Avere l'assistente linguistico aiuta a gestire meglio il tempo in classe L'assistente linguistico è fonte di nuove idee
L'assistente linguistico migliora la qualità del mio lavoro
L'assistente linguistico rappresenta una possibilità per lo studente L'assistente linguistico è una perdita di tempo
36 “l’assistente di italiano rapprensenta un lavoro extra per l’ insegnante”. The fact that the assistant is not a teacher and does (or at least should not) work as teacher is a thing to keep in mind, reading through the opinions of our teachers. Obviously, we cannot deny that a person who has never spent one hour in a class could be at the beginning less secure and confident than a person with some hours of teaching on his/her back: surprisingly, only 10% of our teachers completely agree that the assistant must be expert in the teaching of Italian but nobody (0%) agree that: ”è meglio avere un’assistente che non ha studiato per diventare insegnante”. Apparently, our teachers consider the assistant a figure that needs to be followed (and this brings probably extra work to them) but at the same time they do not think that this extra work is brought by the fact that the assistant has not or little teaching experience. A possible variable to consider could be the language: on the one hand, 74% of our teachers completely agree on the fact that the assistant must speak a correct Italian, on the other hand only 26% agrees on the fact that the assistant must be able to speak (we used the Italian word: esprimersi, as ability to clearly speak and understand) in English. 48 % partially agree with it and surprisingly, a tiny minority, 26% disagree or they do not completely agree with the fact the assistant should be able to express himself in English. What we saw from our experience is that the assistant should really make an effort not to use English with the students; the possibilities students have to speak Italian (considering the timetable etc.) are very little and particularly at the VCE level, the students
must work hard on their Italian speaking skills. In addition, data from paragraph 4.1 revealed that the use of target language (Italian) is very low. (See Chapter 4.1). Apparently a person who is smart and propositive, even though with no teaching training is much better considered than a person with teacher training but no enthusiasm.
As conclusion of this part, we report the outcomes from the statement: “non importa la sua formazione se ha voglia di lavorare” : what we aimed to extrapolate with this sentence was to what extent the efforts, the empathy, the engagement, are more (or less) important qualities rather than teaching or language skills: more than 50% of the informants agree with the fact that the training is not as important as the efforts and the engagement and involvement of the assistant. Teachers have later been asked: ”L’assistente facilita il lavoro all’insegnante”. 48% of the teachers completely agree with it, while only 18% to some extent disagree. Moreover, 42 % of the teachers fully agree on the fact that the assistant represents a big help to better organize the class. Obviously, having a second person available in class makes the organization easier . We think that the assistant represents a big help for the teacher. In relation to this, 61 % of the teachers fully disagree on the fact that the assistant is helpful only for particular programs as CLIL
programs for instance but they consider it helpful at a wider stage.
In conclusion we can say that the teachers generally have a great consideration of the language assistant; this means that the assistant is involved in every activity, from planning to testing as we will better see in chapter 4. In addition, the teachers consider the assistant a big help even though some of them reported few difficult situations with assistants considered to be not very involved or motivated. We would
37 like to add that motivation of both, teachers and assistants stay at the basis of the positive outcome of the experience.
2.2.1 General opinion level of satisfaction of the language assistantship program
We see from Fig. 12 here below that the general opinion teachers have on the assistantship is positive:
Figure 12: Level of satisfaction.
We now report some opinions from the 2012 language assistants, who at this stage have few days to finish their assistantship. We want to report their opinion in order to give an appropriate conclusion using the voices of those who have lived this experience directly:
I worked in a Secondary College, a public school in a suburb of the city: the majority of our students came from lower-middle class families and often experienced difficult situations within their families. Therefore, most of the time, the main challenge for me and the other teachers was to manage the disruptive kids which used to systematically interrupt the teaching and prevent the rest of the class from learning. I was not able to find a complete resolution as problems still occurred with the most difficult kids but, observing other teachers and getting to know the students I learnt how to manage them, minimize the interruptions and maintain a safe class environment. The LOTE Department is a
89% 7% 4% 0%