INITIAL IDEA

This research wants to find how our student's second language is supposed to develop when they are provided with a language-rich environment, where they can participate in interesting experience that involves using the English language.

As far as concerns EFL teaching in primary grades in Italy, we have to reach the following main aims:
a- cognitive development and attitude to authonomous-study;
b- communicative and linguistic awareness through the knowledge of the foreign language;
c- socio-cultural competence and a positive attitude towards foreign languages and cultures.

We commonly agree on the fact that learning a foreign language is not a purely intellectual activity, for it is an experience that involves the whole person of the learner.
For this reason acquiring an L2 and learning to use it in order to convey messages, to communicate, is a task that engages, above all, the field of communicative skills of an individal and exercises, in a wider action, all the expressive articulations that give form and sense to the language, from verbal, emotional, corporal, artistic points of view.

All the activity-based and communicative teaching strategies can help us to restore the total integration of the learning experience by starting from the meaning and reaching, through that, the language, giving children exposure and practice to tasks that enhance the pleasure of learning a foreign language.
According to this trend we can set the purpose to gain useful hints to train the learners in all the fundamental skills -listening, speaking, reading, writing- and in all the phases of the didactic sequence - presentation, drill, recombining activities and of freer use of the language-, as well as in several different kinds of verbal communication - encouragement, criticism, assent, explanation, etc.-.

That is why it seems worthwhile to adopt an inter-disciplinary and cross-curricular perspective. The EFL classes I am teaching in, indeed, participate to the common project of our Circolo Didattico (which consists of five schools on a wide montainous area) whose aims are:
- to reinforce conceptual development in all the students;
- to help the students to learn how to learn providing a serene learning environment;
- to enhance continuity between the learning processes extabilished in each class curriculum;
- to use the linguistic tools to develop all the subjects in the curriculum;
- to link the infant-primary, primary-secondary curricula in order to achieve an armonic development of the learner's personality.

I shall try, therefore, to clear the idea that all this has something to do with the concept that a language is learned by developing the communicative skills and all the cognitive skills related to the four skills, giving the students confidence on their learning processes, and trying to achieve a consistent level of authonomy in the capability of learning to learn.

I would like to explore several aspects of the main themes opened until here:
-the use of structured and unstructured materials,
-how to enrich student's vocabulary;
- how to facilitate grammar reflections;
-how to catch best student's interest;
-better class activities management;
-how to integrate handicapped children;
-updating english textbooks;
-cross-curricular activities;
-the use of classroom english in small classes;
- ....

All this has somehow to deal with classroom management, learner's indipendence and better curriculum developing. At this point it is time to answer the fundamental question a teacher asks herself to start to problematize the situation she is teaching in:
Which is the most problematic aspect of my classes this year?
And, furthermore, how can I study my situation with a view of improving the quality of my action within it?

There is the demand to describe the environemntal situation in order to analyse my teaching practice to find out if there are valid and effective elements or if there are any aspects of my current work revealing an ineffective content.

I would like to change, trying to improve it, the situation of a class of mine: this is a two-level class composed by absolute beginners plus a low second level group, it comes from the union of two different small classes, one of which has already learnt a considerable amount of vocabulary and worked on some basic structures.

The most important aspect of the whole actual class is that there are in it two handicapped pupils and two students with deep social problems: the class consists in only ten children aged from seven to nine, coming from a wide mountainous area, not sharing the same socio-economic status and showing relevant problems also in the acquisition of the basic skills in all the taught subjects.

INITIAL IDEA - RECONNAISSANCE - ORGANIZATION
GENERAL PLAN - OBSERVATION GRIDS -PLANNING
LINKING THE BOOKS - CLASSROOM SETTINGS
DEVELOPING ACTION: CLASSROOM ENGLISH
CONCLUSIONS - BIBLIOGRAPHY

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