"Fregati dall'accento!". Lo stereotipo etnico e linguistico nei contesti scolastici

Discrimination in school settings is the main topic of this article, which describes the results of different field investigations carried out in some Tuscan schools over a two-year period from 2018 to 2020. The research, which is part of two broader research projects on foreign accents, focuses primarily on the teaching staff. We report the results of two sections of the questionnaire, the first on expectations relating to academic success, the second on ethnic stereotypes: i) teacher prejudice towards students related to social status, gender and presence/absence of a migration background; ii) students with a migration background were subject to different expectations depending on their origin: ethnic groups with an older, `European' migration history (Albanians and Romanians) obtained positive assessments compared to those with a more recent migratory history. Field evidence was compared to the reference literature and comments provided by the teachers themselves during the fieldwork: these comments offered a valuable litmus test for those using questionnaires for research purposes with teachers.