Abstract
South Tyrol has never been a linguistically homogenous territory but from the beginning of the ’90s its linguistic landscape has started to become even more diverse. This has also influenced the region’s educational institutions as they are increasingly in need of dealing with students’ linguistic repertoires and promoting plurilingual competences. The project ‘One school, many languages’ (SMS 2.0) investigates the new, diverse face of multilingualism in South Tyrol and promotes the perception of linguistic diversity as an enrichment by strengthening language awareness among pupils, teachers and all relevant stakeholders involved in the educational sector. As such, its didactic, research-based activities were addressed to schools without distinguishing between the three language groups - a novelty for the regional educational landscape.
SMS 2.0 is divided into two strands: the ‘service’ strand produces materials and concrete resources for the dissemination and management of plurilingualism in the classroom; the ‘study’ strand aims to scientifically support teams of teachers in making the most of the increasing linguistic and cultural heterogeneity of their classes.
The project ends in 2023 and the idea is to use and leverage the experience of SMS 2.0 to develop a new research-based project and new tools to make the most of South Tyrol’s new linguistic diversity and in order to set plurilingualism as an educational goal.