I risultati

Let the students assess their work

As one can see from the final paragraph of the students' report, they also had to discuss the outcome of their project: they were asked to identify the strong and weak points of what they had done.

They mostly focused on organisational problems and difficulties related to the computing work. Strangely enough, in the report, they did not mention language issues, however they were discussed later on when the whole work was finished.

Teacher's assessment

Clearly, from the teacher's point of view, the language issue is the most relevant. One way to make sense of the work performed by the students is to prepare a set of expected results beforehand. But in my opinion, this is somewhat too rigid. For this project I decided to use a grid instead.

From formal and informal talks with the class I got the distinct impression that this was a much appreciated activity on their part, especially from the "good" students, those that are usually more motivated to learn.
However, I am also convinced that, for some, the project was a nice thing to do because they did very little, but this is the liabilities side of any group work.

Use of English

Although not all, most did use English during discussions and working sessions (analysis of data from databse to determine the layout of the written report). However also Italian was used in some cases, especially when threre were disagreements among the group members.

The written report and the presentation were conducted in English, with a general level of performance that was communicatively acceptable.

	Good	Barely acceptable	Poor
Intensive use of spoken English			x
English for communication	x
Cross-curricular approach effectiveness	x
Goals achieved	x
Students' motivation to work with English	x
Involvement of whole class		x
Final product (survey + presentation)	x