Blended CLIL e autonomia: un percorso didattico per studenti cinesi di italiano L2

In recent years, the Language Centre of the University of Naples "L'Orientale" (CILA) had to face foreign students’ growing demands to learn Italian as a second language, due to the various international exchange projects between the Orientale and foreign universities, above all Chinese. The Italian language courses organized by CILA, originally aimed at the development of the four language skills, over the years have been first directed towards Italian for Academic Purposes and then implemented according to CLIL methodology. The goal of this paper is to describe a blended CLIL course of Linguistics in Italian developed to help Chinese students to learn a specific subject (Linguistics and Second Language Education) and to become proficient in Italian. Moreover, the virtual course has been enhanced with a language area named "Online Self-Access" designed to help students not only to learn Italian but also to become autonomous. The course integrates face-to-face classroom instruction and on-line learning. The virtual classroom, based on the Moodle platform, has been structured around three main sections: thematic, social and linguistic. The first section presents the contents of the course through video lessons with a series of interactive multimedia activities that students have to perform before, during and after the viewing of the video. The social area promotes interaction between teachers and students through forums and chats. The third section offers a virtual self-access centre with pathways and resources that students can choose, according to their level and needs, to learn the Italian language and present contents.