Approaches to Diversity: Tracing Multilingualism in Teacher Education in South Tyrol, Italy

This chapter seeks to shed light on the facets of multilingualism in education in Italy, with particular attention paid to South Tyrol, the northern Italian border territory, and how teacher education prepares future teachers for language diversity in schools there. For the purposes of this chapter, multilingualism includes majority and minority languages that are the languages of schooling, foreign languages taught in schools and heritage languages of children with a migrant background. In the context of South Tyrol, the focus on official languages (Italian, German and Ladin) and fostering these require much attention; consequently, migrant-induced multilingualism has not, to date, been a priority in the province. While German and Italian are official majority languages, Ladin, an ancient Romance language spoken in several valleys, enjoys an official minority status in the province. ‘Foreign language’ refers primarily to English (although other modern languages are also taught depending on the school curricula), and heritage languages include languages such as Albanian, Arabic and Urdu, the languages of the largest migrant groups in the province. Despite increasing language diversity, the ability to speak more than one language is not considered a prerequisite for teachers in Italy today except in those border regions where several languages have historically coexisted, and in contexts where language diversity is long established and is, consequently, recognized in school curricula. South Tyrol is such a case since German, Italian and Ladin are official languages; the province thus offers an interesting example of multilingual teacher education and highlights the challenges of institutionalizing multilingualism in terms of language competences in school policy and practices.