Abstract
Due to its peculiar geographical position and history, South Tyrol has never been a linguistically homogeneous territory. Nowadays, the linguistic profile of Italy’s northernmost province is characterised by the coexistence of both old and new forms of multilingualism. The former comprise the three official languages of the province – German, Ladin and Italian – as well as local dialects, whose role is pivotal in a territory where around 85% of the population live in rural areas (ISTAT 2021). New forms on multilingualism, on the other hand, consist of languages brought to the territory by a growing number of migrants since the beginning of the ‘90s (Medda-Windischer & Membretti 2020). This complex picture has an impact in particular on the educational sector, where teachers now work with students whose linguistics repertoires (Busch 2012) are increasingly complex and heterogenous compared to the past.
In this paper, the authors will look at the way multilingualism – both in its old and new forms - is perceived, dealt with and leveraged in schools located in rural areas of South Tyrol. In order to do so, the authors will draw on data gathered through an online questionnaire in the spring of 2021. Administered to a selected sample of teachers of all subjects working at all levels - from primary to upper secondary – of the province’s tripartite school system, the questionnaire aimed at exploring if and how teachers from both rural and urban South Tyrolean schools address the linguistic diversity of their students by promoting plurilingual didactic activities in their classes.
By discussing the responses given by over 600 questionnaire participants, it is hoped that the present paper will shed light on how linguistic diversity is addressed and possibly leveraged in rural schools of a province whose pre-existing structures, including educational ones, have to deal with both old and new language communities.
References
Busch, B. (2012), The linguistic repertoire revisited. Applied Linguistics 33: 5, 503–523.
Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT) (2021), Principali statistiche geografiche sui comuni italiani, published on 5 July 2021. https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/156224.
Medda-Windischer, Roberta / Membretti, Andrea (Eds.) (2020), Migrationsreport Südtirol 2020/ Rapporto sulle migrazioni Alto Adige 2020. Bolzano: Eurac Research.