Abstract
In what is Italy’s northernmost region, South Tyrol, where old and new forms of multilingualism coexist and are highly politicised and constantly negotiated and contested, an effective language education is essential for nurturing intercultural understanding as well as interlinguistic awareness. In this context, teachers of every subjects are at the frontline both when it comes to foster and leverage multilingualism in classes and in addressing the needs of contemporary society: global and interconnected yet attentive to and respectful of local diversities. The abstract focuses on the didactic resources for teachers and presents how their contents were first analyzed and then adapted to eLearning courses. By developing online resources, the research team wants to give teachers digital tools to foster the teaching of multilingualism and the intercultural awareness (Byram: 2003) among students with rich and complex linguistic repertoires (Busch: 2012). Based on the principles of multilingual didactics and of pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures (Candelier et al.: 2011), the eLearning courses are available in two languages and provide an innovative and playful approach to support a more positive and conscious view of the current but always changing linguistic landscape. On the other hand, eLearning courses offer teachers access to digital pedagogical strategies, resources, and best practices and thus they can better enhance their competence in language didactics and gain valuable insights into effectively leveraging multilingualism as a pedagogical asset. Although some teachers feel reluctant in introducing digital tools in the classrooms (Mizova et al.: 2023), the advancement in the use of digital technologies and within the educational programs is now an irreversible phenomenon.
The resources were first developed within the project “One school, many languages” (SMS 2.0) whose goal is to find out how multilingualism is perceived, dealt with and leveraged in German, Italian and Ladin schools in the multilingual province of South Tyrol.