Universal Design for Learning with reference to English language teaching in Italian Higher Education

This position paper aims to reflect on the planning of language teaching in the Italian Higher Education institutions of the future. The COVID- 19 emergency has enabled us to re-evaluate, to some extent, existing practices with the aim of developing new approaches that integrate the best practices of the past with the innovation afforded by technology in a principled blended learning approach to language teaching in the future. We present a pedagogical model, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), that may be adapted to suit local needs with an eye towards communication and inclusion, providing frameworks for each learner to develop in the most advantageous way possible. Learners, who are largely users of English as a Lingua Franca, need to develop their communicative competence above all and, to this aim, intercultural communication competence for interaction in global arenas is of paramount importance.