Italian school teachers' attitudes towards students' accented speech. A case study in Tuscany

The system of beliefs and ideas related to foreign accents held by Italian school teachers in Tuscany is the object of this research. We focused our exploratory survey on three different Italian cities, where we collected 144 questionnaires, both in lower and upper secondary schools. The questionnaires were structured in order to obtain answers concerning teachers' ideology toward foreign accents and their opinions toward multiculturalism and multilingual education at school. In addition to this, teachers were asked to rate the perceived adequacy of their preparation as well as that of the school systems, which a multicultural class imposes, and the perceived level of integration of students with migratory background in their classes. The aim was to verify if teachers from different cities with different percentages of students with migratory backgrounds showed dissimilar attitudes toward foreign accents and multicultural and multilingual education at school. The results showed that teachers are homogeneous in their negative attitudes toward foreign-accented speech. Additionally, a correlation between language attitudes and the evaluation of multilingual and multicultural educational practices was found. This standard language ideology therefore appears not to vary across cities, demonstrating that exposure to Italian linguistic diversity appears to be irrelevant in the construction of attitudes toward foreign-accented speech.