A proposal for tools and methods to increase the use of plain language in administrative procedures about immigration

Currently Public Administration in Italy works in an intercultural context, given that immigration is growing and an increasing percentage of users who interact with the public offices are foreign nationals. For this reason, it's important that public institutions learn to communicate with all their users in an effective and appropriate way, to ensure all citizens the right to information. To inform citizens about their rights and duties it is important to use the right type of language, especially in relation to clarity and comprehensibility. In addition, public communication takes place almost exclusively through the Web and the language used should be appropriate to this means of communication. The aim of this research is to develop a collaborative method to support public officers in simplifying the process of information content about administrative procedures relating to immigration. This objective was pursued by developing a specific methodology that, on the one hand, took into account theoretical tools already in use for clear and effective administrative writing and to make the web contents usable and, on the other hand, provided data from focus groups and interviews conducted. These research activities were carried out involving four types of groups of people: linguistic-cultural mediators, immigration front-office civil servants, teachers of Italian as a second language and immigrants, in order to acquire additional guidelines and specific guidance to improve the comprehensibility of such content for these target users. The research has been conducted as part of the project PAeSI (Public Administration and Foreign Immigrants) to simplify contents available to foreign users through the Web Portal on immigration of the Tuscany Region, originally designed for domain expert users. In this paper we will present the collaborative method described above, to support public officers in the process of simplification of informative contents on the administrative procedures relating to immigration.