Sviluppare, valutare e certificare l’italiano per lo studio

The article deals with a research project developed by the Laboratorio di Glottodidattica of the University of Parma aimed at acquiring information and process knowledge from direct work in the field of teaching Italian for study purposes mainly to students in their first and second year of high school (age: between 14 and 15 approx.). The project as a whole is directed not only to Italian and first and second generation non-Italian students, but also to their subject and language teachers and to cultural mediators. As a part of the research project a certificate called Italstudio has been developed. It is aimed at evaluating non-native pupils’ communicative competence in Italian for study purposes. After a short description of the context, the article presents some results which arise from the analysis of the performance of Italian and non-Italian students whose competence has been assessed through different tests for Italian for study purposes. These tests are also briefly described.