Abstract
Schools in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, are becoming increasingly multilingual. This is also true for South Tyrol, Italy’s northernmost province, in which institutional trilingualism (German, Italian, Ladin) and diglossia now coexist with new languages and varieties brought into the area thanks to migration flows. The increasing linguistic and cultural diversity of the province has had a strong impact on everyday school life and poses new challenges to teachers. The inclusion and valorisation of all the languages that students bring into the classroom, as well as the mobilisation of their entire linguistic repertoires for learning, in fact, require specific skills, attitudes and knowledge on the part of teachers.
In our talk, we will describe COMPASS (Didactic Competences in the Multilingual Classroom), a research and training initiative embedded into the project One school, many languages (SMS 2.0) promoted by Eurac Research. The initiative aims to support teams of teachers from German and Italian-speaking primary schools in making the most of the increasing linguistic heterogeneity of their classes, and to accompany them on their way towards an increasingly inclusive and linguistically-sensitive multilingual didactic practice.
In our contribution, we will first provide our understanding of the skills, attitudes and knowledge that teachers involved in (or shifting to) multilingual education should possess, and then describe the two main components of the COMPASS initiative. These include a two-year professional development course geared towards issues related to multilingual education, and a longitudinal research study on teachers’ attitudes and reported practices