This proposal focuses on second language (L2) education and certification as part of the integration policies in Italy. More specifically, it explores the enactment of immigration policies within State schools for adults, by taking into account the translation and interpretation processes of the compulsory testing in Italian L2 for non-EU citizens.

Over the last 20 years, many EU member states have progressively introduced stricter immigration policies targeting non-EU citizens who apply to enter, settle or naturalize in their territories. In order to obtain the residence permit, immigrants are often required to pass a test aimed at evaluating their knowledge of the language and culture of the hosting country (Rocca et al., 2020).

Therefore, language proficiency emerged as a key element in the gate-keeping process leading to residence rights, and as one of the main criteria to measure integration, a phenomenon to which many researchers refer with the expression “testing regimes” (Hogan-Brun et al., 2009). These policies often underpin discourses on a supposed homogeneity of national culture and language, and problematise those languages and varieties that are not considered as prestigious as the standard national one (Shohamy, 2007; Pochon-Berger & Lenz, 2014).

Like other EU countries, Italy introduced compulsory language testing for residence permit purposes in 2009; in 2012 this policy process intertwined with the Reorganisation of the System of Adult Education. Therefore, with their re-organisation, State schools for adults have taken the role of delivering courses of Italian L2 and of creating, administering, and evaluating tests.

The entanglement between immigration and adult education policies has been already addressed in the literature: several studies explored the discourses underpinning the “testing regimes” targeting immigrants in many European countries (Van Oers et al., 2010), as well as in Italy (Love 2014; Machetti & Rocca, 2017). However, less attention has been devoted to how the school staff interprets and translates these “testing regimes” into school practices, and how students give meaning to the practices created for them.

This proposal is theoretically rooted on a definition of policies as social-constructs: “Policy is a fundamental ‘organising principle’ of society which [...] provides a way of conceptualising and symbolising social relations, and around which people live their lives and structure their realities” (Shore & Wright, 2011, p.2). This perspective challenges the idea that policies are rational, linear and hierarchic processes; and it embraces an extended definition of political actors which includes, besides governors, all those involved in the policy enactment: “The passage of law is one moment in a process of appropriation and contestation when a political coalition succeeds in silencing others, making their version authoritative and embedding it in the precepts and procedures of the state. But the dominant version can be immediately contested as it is translated in concrete situations” (ivi, p. 13).

Policy enactment is a concept proposed by Ball et al. (2012), and refers to the “set of embodied practices that are attached to different types and groups of policy actors” (p.121). Putting policies into practice is a complex and creative process, as policies are translated from text to action, in context, through the collective work of individuals with different positions in the school and with regard to the policy, and with the resources available.

This proposal explores the enactment of language tests from the perspectives of school staff and students, by answering the following research question and sub-questions:

How are “testing regimes” enacted in State schools for adults?

1. How does school staff interpret the integration policy and translate the compulsory language testing into practice?

2. How do students make sense of language education and testing practised at school?

In line with the theoretical framework presented above, this proposal performs policy analysis through policy ethnography. The object of policy ethnography is not limited to explore how people experience the consequences of policies on their daily lives; it aims also to observe policy processes and practices in a specific context, in order to better understand them (Dubois 2015). The data set includes notes from around 110 hours of participant observation, 42 semi-structured interviews and a selection of policy documents (15). Data were collected over the school year 2020-21 within two different locations of the same State school for adults, both located in the urban area of a city in Northern Italy. This contribution focuses especially on the semi-structured interviews with members of the school staff (18) and students (24), and informal interactions between the researcher and the participants during fieldwork. School staff covers different positions (principal, secretaries, teacher coordinators, teachers, janitors); 10 interviews were conducted with teachers of Italian L2, who are usually involved in the creation and evaluation of language testing for immigration purposes. Students (14 F, 10 M) differed in terms of their motivation to migration, time already spent in Italy, level of competence in Italian and, consequently, level of the language course in which they were enrolled. All data will be used to explore the participants’ positions with regard to the language testing policy. Specifically, the interviews with the school staff will help to uncover two different aspects of policy enactment: interpretation and translation (Ball et al., 2012), and the power relations behind them: “Interpretation is an initial reading, a making sense of policy […] a decoding” (ivi, p. 43); “Translation is a sort of third space between policy and practice. It is an iterative process of making institutional texts and putting those texts into action [...]” (ivi, p. 45). The interviews with the students will address the second sub-research question, in order to better understand how they experience language education and testing. The results of the analysis are put into dialogue with those that emerged from a previous discourse analysis performed on integration policy documents. This is possible because this contribution is part of an on-going PhD project, a policy ethnography that investigates the enactment of the reorganisation of the adult education system in Italy, and includes a corpora of policy documents.

As part of my PhD project, I already analysed a selection of policy documents that exposed the entanglement between immigration policies and adult education policies in Italy. The results reflect some of the processes pinpointed by other case studies of different EU countries: the political process that imposed language and culture testing is an expression of an increasingly stricter immigration strategy. In Italy, this position became dominant when immigration started to be constructed mainly as a problem of public security and, consequently, to be managed almost exclusively by the Ministry of Interior Affairs. The dominant discourses underpinning the testing regimes have been modified and blurred over the policy process, especially when other political actors, such as the Ministry of Education or Language certification institutes, entered the political arena. So far, the on-going analysis on the policy enactment of testing regimes has highlighted that integration policies have had a deep influence on the State schools for adults. The number of students asking to be enrolled in the A2 level of Italian L2, which is the compulsory level to be reached in order to obtain the residence permit, has increased significantly. This phenomenon implied issues at organisational and didactic level and, to a certain extent, affected the relationship between teachers and students. Moreover, the enactment of testing regimes encouraged standardization and professionalisation processes. Although these mechanisms may ensure more transparency and equity over the testing practices, they can also support an exasperated linguistic standardisation, which could in turn exclude vulnerable students, as those with limited literacy competences. The analysis will explore these first insights in depth.

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