This contribution is a summary of a paper presented at the conference “Identità e dignità: AICLU per le lingue nel mondo”, 9-11 July 2009, Centro Linguistico Interfacoltà Kore of the University of Enna.

It is well known that the Romans built their empire on law and on the unifying power of Latin. The Roman Empire, the first “European community” – or rather “Mediterranean” – in history, was based fundamentally on the exclusive use of the Latin language as a political, cultural and social bond. More than two thousand years later, the European Community, born from the ruins of the Second World War, made a completely different choice, basing the European promotion of education on respect for the linguistic and cultural identities of the member countries. The project aims at preparing Community students for democratic citizenship, on the basis of two fundamental concepts: multiculturalism and multilingualism. This initiative finds in the Cresson-Flynn White Paper (1995) its statute of reference for asserting the centrality of education and training and the need for a renewal of the European training system. It introduces as an essential element the manifold linguistic commitment in schools of every order and grade, whose enriching character it suggests and promotes. In other words, the Commission and the other Community bodies uphold the basic importance, for European citizens, of the study and knowledge of several foreign languages, a competence seen as an asset for the cultural and democratic development of the Community and as an instrument of peace, cohesion and development.
Unfortunately, even in the face of quite precise commitments, subscribed to at the European level, the various governments often move according to logics of domestic politics that are many times at odds with the Community directives. I became aware of this during the research that then took shape in the volume I published together with Claudio Vinti: Una professione da inventare. Il docente di lingua straniera nella scuola primaria (Edizioni Guerra, Perugia, 2008). It was precisely on that occasion that the idea arose of a Europe-wide study on the situation of the teaching of a foreign language in primary school, also in view of the privileged vantage point in which I found myself in my new role as a teacher of Italian in the French primary school.
My professional training was enriched, over time, by a psychological and linguistic competence, which led me to specialize as a teacher of English (within the first courses organized by the provincial school authorities in the nineteen-nineties). I practised this profession for several years in Italy before obtaining my first posting abroad, at a European school in Great Britain, where I worked for five years. Back in Italy, I taught English in primary school as a specialist. In September 2008 my second experience abroad began, as a teacher of Italian in the French primary school.
In Great Britain I gained a particularly constructive experience. I was part of a multilingual teaching staff coming from almost all the European countries. I taught the curricular subjects in Italian, in the Italian section, and Italian as a foreign language in the other language sections. The staff meetings were often occasions to express opinions and formulate proposals regarding the harmonization of the teaching of the various disciplines – from mathematics to the sciences, from history to geography – within the various language sections. Great importance was attached to the professional exchange among teachers of different countries, fundamental for the enrichment of one's own professionalism at the methodological level. But what I found truly formative was the cultural and linguistic offering proposed to the students, centred on the concept of promotion of multilingualism with the aim of fostering the culture of difference and of tolerance, an aim altogether unthinkable in other contexts.
The first foreign language learned in primary school becomes the language of instruction of certain disciplines in secondary school. The early and daily exposure of children to a second language allows them to master it and, subsequently, to study certain disciplines in that language. At the same time the study of a third language is begun, which will reinforce the pupil's cultural baggage; by the end of the course of studies the pupil will have come into contact with at least three Community languages, in which, at different levels, they will in any case manage to express themselves.
It is my personal conviction that the experience of the European schools could constitute an important point of reference for the Community countries and therefore for Italy as well, since, although they came into being with different aims, they represent a successful attempt to bring different languages and cultures together in respect for all identities, anticipating, among other things, the current European directives on multiculturalism and multilingualism. The introduction of the foreign language (FL) into the Italian elementary school had a troubled course from the very time of the 1985 curricula. The teaching of the FL, in fact, for many years had an uneven diffusion across the national territory, owing to the scarcity of qualified teachers. In Europe, as Fernando Galván reminds us in his study Políticas de promoción de lenguas extranjeras en España y la difusión del español en el mundo (2005), the pioneers of foreign-language teaching were the Nordic countries and Luxembourg, which as early as 1912 included foreign languages in its curricula. Between the nineteen-sixties and the nineteen-seventies it was the turn of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Finland, followed by Austria, the Netherlands and Portugal and, with greater delay, by Spain, France, Greece and Italy (1992).
It is precisely in these years that in Italy the figure of the FL specialist teacher arises: an elementary-school teacher who teaches the FL in several classes. In the ministry's intentions this was to be a temporary figure, pending the maturing and spread, among primary-school teachers, of the professional skills needed to teach an FL. In this way everyone was to be enabled to pass to the figure of the specialized teacher, capable, in his or her own class or teaching module, of teaching the FL as well, alongside the curricular disciplines. An objective that still today the current ministry continues to pursue, as clearly emerges from the latest decisions of the Minister.
It is nonetheless undeniable that in the meantime various negative elements have intervened in the bumpy path of the teaching of foreign languages in the Italian primary school. The first, in my view penalizing from the educational and cultural point of view, is represented by the compulsory nature of English alone, while the possibility of learning another Community language is offered only as optional, within the teaching added to the compulsory timetable. In any case it will be the families who decide whether or not to take up this opportunity, compatibly with the economic and professional resources of the school. This makes it foreseeable that few will be those pupils who can really have access to a second foreign language. Thus, from the initial possibility of choosing which foreign language to learn among English, French, German and Spanish, we have arrived at the compulsory nature of English alone and at the de facto exclusion of all the others. A trend that I consider dangerous and penalizing on the cultural and educational level, and that involves the university as well, is the die-off of second languages other than English that is to be witnessed in all the faculties.
It is true that the European directives often assign a central role, for the success of language teaching, to the pupils' parents, and the statistics show that, where the possibility of choosing is given, the families choose in the majority English, followed at a distance by French and then by German and Spanish. But it is equally true that the decisions taken in Italy by the ministerial officials seem to respond more to budgetary needs and to a certain cultural short-sightedness than to compliance with the European directives. Moreover, to endorse the preference expressed by the majority of families does not always prove to be the best choice (I need only recall what happened with the abolition of Latin).
In fact, to reduce to English alone the languages that children encounter in primary school is a grave impoverishment, even if in secondary school the languages become two. In any case, almost all countries are moving in different directions. This is what is argued, among others, by Maria Cecilia Luise, who in an article of hers warns of the harm that a choice of this kind can have on the education of pupils (L’insegnamento precoce delle lingue straniere: un excursus dei documenti europei e le implicazioni per la scuola primaria italiana, in “Studi di Glottodidattica”, no. 4, 2007, pp. 65-75). The fact that 77% of EU citizens hold that children should learn English as their first language gives valuable indications of a practical order, but it does not exclude the possibility of the simultaneous teaching of a second language, nor still less can it ignore that research in language teaching considers early exposure to several foreign languages a cognitive and communicative advantage for pupils. This is also what Daria C. Coppola argues who, recovering the formative dimension of language education in primary school, proposes, as a didactic response, to

«present not one but several languages together, so as to bring out from the very beginning the conventional character of the different linguistic codes and the many and varied socio-cultural realities that they convey. By coming at once into contact with several language-cultures, it would in our view prove easier for the pupil to place the one that will then become the chief object of study, together with the mother tongue, within that expressive space which comprises the many and diverse languages and the tongues of humankind.»

(D.C. Coppola, Europa, lingue e Istruzione primaria, Turin, UTET, 2002, p. 33)

The reflections of Daria Coppola, supported among other things by numerous and convincing experiences, demonstrate in my view how important, on the educational level, an action of awareness-raising towards plurilingualism is, and how essential it is for all educational actors to distinguish clearly the language-teaching needs from the merely instrumental ones that often lead families to request English for its role as a lingua franca. Rather than of a “foreign language” in the Italian primary school, one should speak of “foreign languages”, as happens for example in France.