Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to report on a cross-sectional, explorative study on plurilingual education that involved 614 teachers working at all levels of education – from primary to upper secondary school – in the autonomous province of South Tyrol (Italy), a historically multilingual area where three official languages now coexist with the new forms of multilingualism brought by recent migration flows (Medda-Windischer, Membretti, 2020). For the purposes of this study, data collection took place via an online questionnaire in the spring of 2021 and sought to explore whether and how plurilingual education was implemented in schools across Italy’s northernmost province, as well as to identify any areas the respondents felt they needed support in. The findings illustrated in the chapter shed light on plurilingual education, a phenomenon that has gained momentum in research, language planning and practice over the last decades, and lead to several considerations that are relevant not only for South Tyrol but also for policymakers, practitioners and researchers in other multilingual areas across Europe.