What challenges do teachers face every day when teaching Italian to adult migrants? Paulon International School (PIS), the Italian partner of the LiLI – Life and Language Skills + Intersectionality for Migrant Women Integration project, answers this question by drawing on its experience as a school of Italian language and culture. Through its work, PIS reflects on the role of language education as a tool for autonomy, inclusion, and participation.
Teaching the language of the host country to adults with a migrant background is one of the most complex and rewarding challenges in education. It is not simply about transmitting a linguistic code, but about equipping learners with the tools to understand a new social, bureaucratic, and relational environment. Adult learners bring with them established knowledge, communication practices, and perceptions of social structures that differ from those of the host country and are deeply rooted in their personal experiences.
The awareness that being able to communicate effectively in the language of the host country is not merely a skill, but a gateway to success, integration, and a better quality of life, lies at the heart of LiLI – Life and Language Skills + Intersectionality for Migrant Women Integration. Coordinated by Programma integra, the project aims to develop innovative tools that combine language learning with the development of life skills, while adopting an intersectional approach capable of responding to the real needs of migrant women.
The Adult Migrant Learner: Not a “Blank Slate”
Research in language education has consistently shown that adults are not simply “grown-up children” who learn through imitation. Studies on second-language acquisition among adults highlight that every learner brings with them a complex cognitive background, an established system of values, and, in many cases, emotional wounds linked to their migration journey.
The identity-related challenges experienced by migrants reflect a process of depersonalisation. Their identity is often defined through deprivation: they become non-Europeans, non-citizens, and, too often, even non-persons. The first step towards regaining the essential tools for independence and self-sufficiency is learning the language of the host country.
Acquiring a new language is one of the key dimensions of integration into the receiving society. It promotes personal autonomy and supports the achievement of one’s migration project. However, this process also requires confronting another crucial dimension: emotions. Numerous scientific publications have highlighted the difficulties—and sometimes the impossibility—that adult migrants experience in expressing their feelings. This often leads to frustration and the sensation of regressing to a state of dependence similar to childhood.
Giving Special Attention to Learning Pathways for Migrant Women
Within adult education, migrant women represent a target group that requires particularly careful educational planning. Many experience multiple forms of discrimination related to both gender and origin, while also facing specific structural barriers, including:
- Domestic isolation: often primarily engaged in caregiving responsibilities, they have fewer opportunities for social interaction than men who are employed outside the home.
- Mental and family workload: they are frequently responsible for managing relationships with institutions on behalf of the entire family, including schools, healthcare services, and public offices.
- Lack of support networks: the absence of safe spaces and peer networks limits opportunities for empowerment and active participation.
For these reasons, as explored within the LiLI project, language teaching for women should be closely integrated with the development of life skills.
For example, it is not enough to teach vocabulary related to the human body; learners also need problem-solving skills to navigate real-life situations such as a medical appointment. Likewise, teaching greetings alone is insufficient: it is equally important to foster critical thinking so that learners can correctly interpret communication in educational or workplace settings and, above all, understand and defend their rights.
Designing learning pathways for adult migrants therefore requires moving beyond rigid curricula focused exclusively on grammar or basic communication needs. Instead, it calls for a flexible approach based on authentic tasks (Task-Based Learning) and closely connected to the concrete needs of the local community.
Only by recognising the complexity of our students’ life stories—and especially those of migrant women—can we transform the classroom into a genuine laboratory of citizenship, where language ceases to be a barrier and finally becomes the key to autonomy.
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