Fostering intercultural language education

Abstract

For a long time the removal of the mother tongue was considered by teachers as the indispensable premise for learning the new language, underestimating the value that the interference between the two different language systems can bring in terms of further enrichment of each. Lack of adequate support from educational institutions leads to fragility and identity crises. The school should look at linguistic and cultural diversity, attributing to it an additional and never subtractive value. The teaching of Italian L2 in the school context must respond to two major needs: to allow children and young people who speak other languages to learn Italian in order to communicate at school and outside school; to allow them, at the same time that they learn Italian for basic communicative uses, to continue their studies in the new language, following the other disciplines using affective/relational support methods.