Abstract
Bi- and multilingual universities in Europe are experiencing a constant growth and strengthening, both as a reflection of actions supporting language minorities and the promotion of multilingualism and tutors’ and students’ mobility carried out by the European Union, and as a response to internationalization trends.
The study presented here, carried out within one of such universities - the trilingual Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, situated in the Italian border (and multilingual) area of South Tyrol - examines how teachers and students in the classroom pursue their interactional goals against the background of institutional and societal multilingualism; in particular, it examines two seminars held in departments with different language policy orientations and with different participants' linguistic repertoires. The analysis, carried out within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis on the basis of audio-and videorecorded materials, focusses on the way in which teachers and students categorize available linguistic resources, and mobilize them in order to negotiate participation frameworks during the events. Furhermore, it is examined how participants' code choices can play a role in terms of social actors' inclusion of exclusion, and how such choices are interrelated with multimodal conduct (gaze, gestures, posture, object manipulation etc.) in the accomplishment of specific communicative moves and in the definition of the ongoing activity. By discussing the various practices of language use emerging in the two events (for instance, oral translation, code-switching, code negotiation, use of a local dialect in peer communication), the paper sheds light on possible forms of multilingual communication in pedagogical academic settings, and on how linguistic diversity can give rise to multilingual practices through which participants organize their interactions.