Nowadays, in school settings, teachers often work with learners who present various kinds of language difficulties. The heterogeneity of students and the drive toward personalized learning frequently lead to labelling, assigning difficulties to recognised categories. In this article, we will address the topic of learning difficulties related to languages, adopting a multi‑perspective approach that allows us to grasp both internal and external contextual factors and how these factors affect the learner’s performance.
If this topic interests you, you can reserve your place at the free webinar for English teachers, which will take place on Thursday 30/05 at 18:00 and will focus precisely on this theme.
The acronym BES – Bisogni Educativi Speciali (Special Educational Needs) carries with it a practice of identifying needs and then individualising approaches. We speak of Special Educational Needs (SEN) to refer to a macro‑category that includes all possible educational and learning difficulties. Whatever the nature of the need, there is a common matrix that unites them: the right to receive an effective individualized or personalized educational intervention.
The BES category covers a wide range of needs that reflects students’ uniqueness within diversity, embracing the principles of the ICF (International Classification of Health) in order to identify those who, permanently or temporarily, for physical, biological, physiological, psychological and/or social reasons, require targeted teaching interventions tailored to their special needs.
BiLS – Bisogni linguistici specifici (Specific Language Needs) refer to “developmental difficulties that affect the growth of communicative competence and significantly impact language learning to the point that adaptations, integration or modification of the language‑education pathway become necessary.”
BiLS fall within Special Educational Needs and represent a sub‑category, because they concern difficulties in the areas of language, communication and learning. Needs may be temporary, as in the case of a foreign student who has just arrived in Italy and has linguistic, cultural and personal needs because they do not yet know Italian. Once this learner has closed the language gap, their temporary need will be resolved, as they will have learned to live in the host country and to understand its language, customs and traditions.
Other needs may be permanent, such as the specific needs of students with DSA – Disturbi Specifici di Apprendimento (Specific Learning Disorders) which can be compensated for through appropriate strategies and effective tools, depending on the type of difficulty or disorder.
Specific Learning Disorders involve a growing percentage of secondary‑school students in Italy. This is largely due to a progressive recognition of these disorders, formalised by Law 170/2010, which defines SLDs and, together with the 2011 Guidelines, provides tools and indications for teaching.
Language‑learning difficulties should never be interpreted as a “problem” of the student, but rather as the result of an interaction that is not optimally aligned between their characteristics and the environments in which they are placed.
The learning environment can widen or reduce the barriers a learner encounters in their language development. In language education, when working with students with SLDs, and bearing in mind the learner’s biological input and the contextual input of the environment, it is necessary to design instruction based on the principles of accessibility, multimodality and inclusion.
With respect to foreign languages, students with SLDs encounter a wide range of linguistic‑communicative difficulties, from internalising vocabulary to reading comprehension, from the use of grammatical structures to fluency and the effectiveness of written and oral production. According to the principle of multisensoriality, which underpins glottodidactic accessibility, the individual’s sensory channels can become a resource because they favour the acquisition of linguistic input.
Another aspect of accessibility is linguistic adaptation, i.e. the modification of language input. A commonly used example is task segmentation and reflection on the metacognitive strategies the student employs during learning. Each person is a social being who lives daily life by integrating existential, linguistic and communicative competences. Activating these competences in everyday life means mastering the language. According to Balboni, communicative competence is “a mental reality which is realised as performance in the world, within communicative events that take place in social contexts where language users perform actions.”
In this regard, it is useful to refer to language proficiency as defined by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), a fundamental tool for all language educators. Language proficiency is articulated through a series of activities that learners must learn to carry out concretely, using expressions and functions typical of the language and acquiring communicative competences in the foreign language.
Teachers often believe that teaching a language simply means transmitting linguistic or grammatical structures. However, promoting inclusive language education means not separating language, mind and body; it means paying attention to differences both on the linguistic‑cultural level—skills, linguistic and cultural repertoires—and on the psycho‑cognitive level—cognitive styles, attitudes, motivation and emotions.
The language classroom, using Caon’s term, can be defined as a Mixed‑Ability Class (MAC), where the teacher encounters a strong heterogeneity of learners and must promote effective learning for everyone, taking into account their differing needs and supporting language learning for each student by moving towards inclusive and accessible teaching. Here, accessibility takes on crucial importance for those with language difficulties.
Teaching interventions must be attentive on several levels:
-
the recognition level, i.e. how the text appears—graphics and style of the material, any images on the page, font and typeface used;
-
the processing level, which concerns the content of the material and the way concepts are presented;
-
the application level, which corresponds to the glottodidactic technique used for an activity or exercise, including instructions. Accessibility at this level also depends on how the technique is proposed, taking into account working‑memory demands and each learner’s specific difficulties.
There is a clear need to lay the foundations for an ecological, inclusive language education, aimed at creating models, operational strategies and reference points to build educational communities in which language learning is attainable for all students. By changing how we “read” a class and recognising it as a nucleus of heterogeneity, the learner learns by doing and becomes the active, engaged protagonist of their own learning.
This rewarding approach boosts self‑esteem and nurtures the learner’s motivation to learn by following the strategies and methodologies that suit them best. From a glottodidactic accessibility perspective, language learning is seen as taking place in contexts where learners interact with their environment—an environment of knowledge and learning free from barriers—in which the student plays an active role and teaching practices gain greater flexibility, fostering higher levels of self‑awareness and autonomy among learners.
Roberta Tardi
Teacher of modern foreign languages, specialised and expert in inclusion processes and in teaching and psychopedagogy for specific learning disorders; expert evaluator of teaching processes; trainer in linguistic education and verbal and non‑verbal communication for teachers; specialist in teaching Italian as a foreign language, guidance‑oriented teaching and mentoring, educational and professional guidance, counselling in helping relationships and career guidance. She writes for specialist journals and is the author of essays and publications.
