Translanguaging as a pedagogical resource in Italian primary schools: Making visible the ordinariness of multilingualism

This chapter introduces data and results of a project named ‘L’AltRoparlante’, which aims at encouraging and promoting individual and collective multilingual repertoires for inclusive instruction in Italian primary schools. The project, which has been recently awarded the European Language Label 2018, embraces translanguaging as a pedagogical resource (García & Li Wei, 2014) and has been carried out in five multilingual superdiverse primary schools located in central and northern Italy since 2016. In this chapter, we analyse interviews with teachers of three schools involved, focusing on their attitudes towards pupils’ linguistic repertoires, on their usual strategies for multilingual class management, and on their evaluation of the newly implemented translanguaging activities in relation to their ordinary teaching praxes. The analysis reveals that the majority of the participating teachers had already been adopting occasional multilingual practices before the project, on the basis of the traits of inclusivity of the Italian educational system. However, as a result of the implementation of the project, all agreed on the necessity of constructing a more structured translanguaging-based pedagogical framework in their ordinary activity.