Language Education and Citizenship

The contribution aims to reflect on the role of schools as a ‘citizenization’ agent in multilingual and multicultural societies. One of the tasks entrusted to schools by Italian constitution is to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of the free exercise of the rights and duties of citizenship and democracy. Of these, one of the first and «the most terrible (because it is the most hidden and concealed)» (De Mauro, 1995) is the inability to use words: «to control written communication, to have full access to the information» (ibid.). In the Italian school system, for historical and political reasons, this task has been interpreted from a monolingual point of view, both as adherence to a language as a closed, non-variable system of forms and structures – whereas the objective should be the ability to move with variable and multiple tools within a complex linguistic space – and as the offer of a single language, Italian, considering the plurilingualism, widespread for centuries throughout Italy, as an obstacle. This attitude towards language and language education has remained constant even when pupils of foreign origin have entered the school system. Their condition of plurilingualism was seen as an impediment to learning both the Italian language and the other school subjects. Thus, the new and complex plurilingual context has not been tackled as a challenge to reformulate the principles of democratic language education (GISCEL, 1975), and to reaffirm the centrality and transversality of language education itself, in the construction of people who think and operate actively in society, and for the construction of a truly inclusive school. Instead, the Italian school system has continued to adopt occasional and not structural policies in response to emergencies, or has gone after more or less transitory fashions, not making «educational research a field of experimental investigation and consequent action» (Ambel, 2018). In the last decades, however, both from a scientific perspective and through language policy recommendations and the proposal of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (Council of Europe, 2001 and 2018), it has emerged that respecting language diversity is a fundamental element of a just and equitable society. Many studies have demonstrated that the right to use one's own language is a decisive component in a person's intellectual and emotional development (Byalistok et al. 2008; Costa et al., 2014) and that the combination of the individual benefits and the educational benefits of plurilingualism has the potential to decrease social and economic inequalities a