Session Information
31 SES 08 A, Preparing Pre-service Teachers for Multilingual Classrooms – Differing Approaches from Europe and Beyond
Symposium
Contribution
This paper is aimed at answering the question what teacher education is like in Italy today when it comes to supporting multilingualism and students’ linguistic resources, including those who are not part of the school curriculum. Italy is a diverse country with a strong focus on language teaching, although in the last century the focus has been on the acquisition of the language of instruction, also for children with a migrant background. In Italy’s primary and secondary schools, there are 826.000 children with a migrant background (first and second generation migrants). This corresponds to 9.4% of the population (MIUR, 2018). Our paper presents an overview of the particularities and structures of teacher education system(s) in Italy and puts a special focus on one region, South Tyrol. In South Tyrol, 10.9% of children have a migrant background (N = 10.155, ASTAT, 2017), and additionally, the region is characterized by multilingualism due to autochthonous official languages: German (62.3%), Italian (23.4%), and Ladin (4.1%). This province – and especially its university (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) may serve as a good-practice example for teacher education with a high degree of multilingual awareness as it does not only already integrate three official languages in everyday’s society and educational institutions but also tries to sensitize future teachers for growing linguistic diversity (also due to migration but also in terms of trade and tourism) as well as its challenges and benefits for lifelong learning. Moreover, the paper presents current challenges for multilingualism in teacher education in Italy, for example, how to create a common national approach for multilingualism in teacher education.
References
ASTAT (2017). Bildung in Zahlen. Retrieved from http://astat.provinz.bz.it/de/aktuelles-publikationen-info.asp?news_action=4&news_article_id=601339 Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (2017). University profile. Retrieved from https://www.unibz.it/en/home/profile/ MIUR (2018). Gli alunni con cittadinanza non italiana. Retrieved from http://www.miur.gov.it/documents/20182/0/FOCUS+16-17_Studenti+non+italiani/be4e2dc4-d81d-4621-9e5a-848f1f8609b3?version=1.0
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