Learning difficulties in foreign students attending Italian high schools. Writing problems
Cesare Cornoldi, Alvaro Pra Baldi, Doriana Tripodi, Elisabetta Morelli
It is a well-known fact that students who were not born in Italy, even after many years of Italian schooling, still have difficulties in school achievements. However, these difficulties have not been thoroughly investigated and diversified, at least for as far as pupils attending Italian high schools are concerned. This study takes its cue from the data collected during the standardisation of a battery of tests including 14 measures of writing abilities collected from about 3,000 students. It confirmed that students who were not born in Italy present academic difficulties, but these weaknesses mainly concern spelling (with a particular difficulty in the use of geminates and accents) and to a lower extent handwriting and expressive writing, whereas no substantial differences appear in the case of mathematics. We can conclude that the difficulties met by foreign students in Italian schools are related to the use of language and not to more general problems encountered in a foreign school.
Keywords
Foreign students, writing, spelling, mathematics.