Abstract
Bi- and multilingual universities in Europe are experiencing a constant growth and strengthening, both as a reflection of minority-language policies and of the promotion of multilingualism carried out by the European Union, and as a response to internationalization trends (see Van Leeuwen/Wilkinson 2003; Veronesi/Nikcevic, forthcoming). This has led to a new role of Language Centres in supporting students’ and tutors’ linguistic needs in terms of general language and LSPs. Furthermore, it has encouraged linguistic investigations on the new conditions of learning and teaching in a second language, and on multilingual interactions taking place in such environments, with the purpose of describing language use and of giving insights on the factors that can make language diversity an asset rather than an obstacle. Within this frame, the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, a trilingual (Italian, German, English) institution situated in the German-Italian area of South-Tyrol (Italy) is currently being investigated by a team of linguists, in terms of practices of language use and multilingual communication in different contexts (face-to-face pedagogical events and informal interactions among students), as well as in terms of representations of languages/multilingualism by students, tutors and administrative staff as emerging in narrative interviews. The presentation is devoted to the discussion of first results of this research (as part of the European project DYLAN). After a brief introduction to the language orientation of the university across faculties, examples taken from (audio- and videorecorded) lectures and seminars will be discussed, showing how lecturers shape their monologic talk for native and non-native speakers (through metacommunication, reformulations, use of more languages), and how multilingual communication is managed in dialogic seminars in terms of code-switching, metatalk and participant- and discourse-related code-switching (Auer 1984). Furthermore, an explorative analysis of lecturers’ and students’ language biographies (Franceschini/Miecznikowski 2004) will be presented, thus giving insights on how social actors view their experience with multilingualism in the university.