Abstract
Bilingual schools are far from being reality in South Tyrol, a province with three official language groups: German, Italian and Ladin. Since 1948 the Ladin group runs a parithetic school system, whereas the German and the Italian groups still maintain separate educational systems. Since 2012 the research project “One school many languages (SMS)” has seen, for the first time, the joint participation of the three autonomous school boards in a collaborative project.
SMS investigated the new, diverse face of multilingualism in South Tyrol, aiming to promote the perception of diversity as an enrichment, increase language awareness of pupils and teachers, and establish multilingualism as an educational goal. As such, its didactic, research-based activities were addressed to schools without distinguishing between language groups - a novelty for the regional educational landscape. From 2013 to 2018 more than 2000 students (aged 7 to 18) took part in the eight workshops developed within the project.
Each workshop focusses on a specific aspect of the variegated and complex world of languages (etymology, intercomprehension, etc.). The most requested workshop, “the game of languages”, where the classroom becomes a giant board game, is the topic of my presentation. I will present a quantitative analysis of the data from semi-structured questionnaires from pupils aged 11 to 14 (middle school) which they filled in after having played the game. The empirical research presents the perspective of the pupils and questions whether this perspective is sustainable, i.e. how such activities are received and evaluated by students?
Results from the analysis inform my conclusions about the importance of activity design and awareness of languages other than the school language(s) for the further development and implementation of inclusive didactics in a bilingual school environment.