La società che cambia. Stranieri a scuola: scenari, buone prassi e criticità

In Italy, combined to the immigration of a temporary nature, in the last years, it has been possible to register a progressive and widespread stabilization of the foreign population. At the same time, however, it is still impossible to establish predefined behaviors of integration. In order to draw strategies of composition of the different ethnicities avoiding processes of assimilation or “subordinate integration”, it would be more appropriate to consider the “multiple belongings”. The young generations of immigrants play fundamental role. In particular, learning the language of the destination country is unanimously considered as a conditio sine qua non for the schooling success and for the integration latu sensu. Education represents a substantial investment for the young and for his family since it constitutes a key to social mobility, especially for the “second generations”. The principal aim of this paper is to analyze the integration level of foreign students in the school system particularly from a linguistic point of view taking into account the level of the command of the Italian language as an indicator of integration in the receiving society. More precisely we intended to determine both the proportion of foreign students (and their main characteristics) who manifest linguistic lacks and the demographic and socio-economic factors that influence the indicator. Concerning the data, we mainly used data of the field survey we conducted ad hoc.