Immigrant students and language barriers to learning: a proposal for making the most of ICT resources

This paper tries to answer the research question of whether and how ICT resources can be profitably used to sustain and foster the school integration of immigrant students. lt focuses on written language learning by drawing on a long term research project carried out by the authors. In the framework of this project an evaluation grid was elaborated with the aim of categorizing the written mistakes of the target population; the spontaneous written production of 98 new-immigrant students from 18 different countries was analysed and a global amount of around 25.000 writing mistakes were classified by means of the grid. The paper discusses the results of this analysis and puts forward the idea that the type and number of mistakes committed by immigrant students is strongly related to the type of mother language and, in particular, to its actual differences I similarities with the second language (the language of the receiving country). In the end, few examples of ICT-enabled exercises are presented, in order to provide concrete instances of the intended rationale behind the construction of personalized learning paths for supporting the written language learning of immigrant students.