Perspectives of Italian L2 Teachers on Integrating Immigrant Women: Insights from a Case Study in Tuscany

The increasing arrival of a growing number of immigrants to Italy raises fundamental issues related to language education aimed at fostering the social integration of adult immigrant women. During the migration process, women have gender-specific needs that concern not only employment and their children’s education, but above all the redefinition of their own identity as mothers and as individuals. Identifying immediately useful communicative needs that can be applied in the sociocultural context in which immigrant women live represents the first step a language teacher must take when planning instructional activities designed to overcome everyday communicative challenges. Teachers working in this area need to take into account the specific linguistic and cultural background of their learners: they must act simultaneously as facilitators and mediators, adopt an intercultural approach, propose alternative cultural models, and offer the necessary strategies to help women engage with Italian culture through the target language, with the aim of promoting language learning for integration. This approach should avoid presenting prepackaged notions of “Italian civilization” and instead invite learners to autonomously discover cultural differences and similarities. To this end, the text presents a qualitative and quantitative study carried out in several reception centers in Tuscany using a questionnaire to analyze the main challenges and key aspects that teachers face when teaching Italian to immigrant women, starting from an awareness of their own socio-anthropological and language-teaching training.