Plurilinguismo e comunicazione: studi teorici e prospettive educative

In this volume we examine the relationship between plurilingualism and verbal communication, in order to outline the different aspects of language contact and plurilingual competence at social, personal and educational level, referring to the major studies on this topic. After considering the spread of plurilingualism in the world, as a value and a resource for society and the person, we present the different types of plurilingualism, and then we concentrate on individual plurilingualism and on the concept of plurilingual competence. We then analyse the ways in which a person is influenced by plurilingualism, in relation to cognitive and psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and neurolinguistic aspects. The relationship between plurilingualism and verbal communication is situated at the intersection between individual plurilingualism and social plurilingualism; so we focus our attention on the different manifestations of language contact in discourse, which are traceable both in the variability of the speaker’s language choice, and in formal phenomena of speech that are the result of the influence of one language on another one (interference, borrowing, code-switching, etc.). As part of an interactional approach to language acquisition we outline the development of plurilingual communicative competence, considering both the situation of the simultaneous acquisition of two languages in childhood and the situation in which a L1 is subsequently joined by other languages, in a natural or guided learning context. Particular attention is paid to the role of L1 in the acquisition of L2, in order to highlight the contribution that the perspective of plurilingualism can offer to the perspective of the acquisition in educational contexts. Finally, we discuss the objectives of a language and educational policy aiming at promoting plurilingualism, with particular attention to the European context and to the concrete actions in the field of language teaching and learning, such as the spread of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) methodology.