Abstract
In South Tyrol two out of twelve officially recognized minority languages in Italy are spoken, namely the German and the Ladin languages, which together with the Italian language have always contributed in making Italy’s northernmost province a multilingual area. Over the last decades and as a consequence of migratory processes, the linguistic landscape of the area has started to become even more diverse.
The project “A lezione con più lingue/ Sprachenvielfalt macht Schule/ A scora cun de plü lingac/ One school, many languages”, better known as SMS (2012-2018), aims at promoting linguistic diversity as an enrichment by increasing language awareness among pupils, teachers, school principals and all relevant stakeholders involved in the South Tyrolean educational sector. In order to achieve this, the project has had a strong focus since the beginning on developing and evaluating practical instruments such as school workshops, didactic materials, teacher training sessions and class projects.
The presentation is on the didactic materials developed within the project. The aim is to give teachers and students practical tools to implement multilingual didactics in schools in a region where an “old” and a “new” multilingualism coexist. Based on the principles of multilingual didactics and on the pluralist approaches to learning and teaching languages, materials in the form of eight “activity boxes” have been developed on topics such as etymology, alphabets of the world, language diversity in Europe and in Italy, and forms of communication. The boxes are available in three languages (German, Italian and English) but have references to more than 90 other languages and have been developed, conceived and designed for pupils aged nine to seventeen. Establishing the acceptance of language diversity, developing curiosity and interest towards languages, cultures and linguistic phenomena in a context of cultural diversity, and increasing awareness through linguistic contact are among the objectives of the pedagogical activities developed within the project.
The materials have been designed to support a more positive and conscious view of the current linguistic landscape with all its challenges and potential, in order to manage the new multilingualism and promote and enhance multilingual awareness among students, teachers and all actors in the educational sphere.