The Spread of Communicative Language Teaching: ELT in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s

Not much research has previously been carried out into the recent history of English Language Teaching (ELT) in Italy, and this chapter aims to shed light, specifically, on ELT in the 1980s and 1990s. On the basis of contemporary sources, interview data and an analysis of secondary school textbooks published locally, the investigation aims to explore how a communicative approach made its way into the Italian school context and was both supported and reinterpreted from a local perspective. The chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, I provide a general overview of the Italian cultural and pedagogical context of the early 1970s, which prepared the ground for a radical renewal of the teaching of foreign languages and paved the way for the so-called ‘communicative’ period. In the second part, I examine how Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) orientations were boosted by school reforms and teacher-training initiatives. In the final part, I report on the preliminary findings of a small-scale study aimed at exploring how communicative teaching principles were interpreted and applied in the design of secondary school textbooks by Italian authors in the 1980s and 1990s.