Abstract
Mediation, defined as the ability to construct and convey meaning within and across languages, varieties, and modalities (Council of Europe 2020: 90), is a crucial educational competence in the sociolinguistic landscape of South Tyrol (Italy), marked by both external (German, Italian, Ladin) and internal (e.g. South Tyrolian German dialect, Standard German) multilingualism and characterized by learners with increasingly diverse linguistic repertoires. The Ladin school system represents a rare multilingual educational context in Europe, with instruction in Ladin, Italian, and German. Building on the CEFR Companion Volume’s mediation framework (Council of Europe 2020) and existing research on multilingual literacy and multicompetence (Cook 2013; Cenoz & Gorter 2011; Riehl 2013, 2021; Manchón 2012; Gantefort 2013; Berthele & Lambelet 2017; Usanova & Schnoor 2021), the COMPLeTT project aims to: (1) document and analyze cross-linguistic mediation and monolingual writing competences of Ladin middle school students in German, Italian, and Ladin; and (2) compile a multilingual learner corpus.
To achieve these objectives, students completed three writing tasks—game instruction, formal report to the headmaster, and informal social media post—each representing a distinct register, based on multilingual input texts (Italian, English, Ladin, Spanish, South Tyrolean German dialect, Dutch). The first survey on German encompassed all third-grade classes in Ladin secondary schools, yielding a corpus of over 600 texts from 205 students of varied linguistic backgrounds.
Initial qualitative analysis, applying CEFR levels and descriptors, reveals substantial variation in students’ writing across registers and varieties. However, the participation of multicompetent, plurilingual learners, the multilingual nature of the tasks, and the diversity of registers challenge established practices in learner corpus research. This contribution introduces the multilingual tasks, presents preliminary findings, discusses methodological challenges and features of the multilingual COMPLeTT corpus, and how it can be used to advance research in plurilingualism, learner corpora and language teacher education.
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