This contribution aims to present the first results of a project carried out in a bilingual area on the enhancement of language skills and metalinguistic awareness. The project is inspired by the "Éveil aux langues" approach of CARAP (Candelier, et al. 2012) and the studies and experiments of Andorno and Sordella (Andorno & Sordella 2018, Andorno 2020).
The project took place in 2022 in three classes of primary school in the province of Bolzano (Italy). The study showed how, learners as young as 7-9, were able to reflect on languages and their functioning starting from a narrative input in several languages. Children were stimulated through the common thread of storytelling and were asked to reflect on the meaning of lexical items and the morphology of the name. The narrative text, used to introduce geometrical concepts such as square, angle, etc. is the book by Anna Cerasoli, La Geometria del faraone (2019) and the languages in which the story was told are:
- Official school languages, i.e. Italian and German,
- Home languages in the class, such as Arabic and Punjabi,
- and languages of linguistic decentralization, that is languages that were not spoken by any of the children in the class, such as Romanian and Albanian.
The interaction between teachers, pupils and the community is never neutral (Cummins 2021): learners are part of an educational structure that proposes patterns of linguistic interaction and these may reflect the communicative experiences and practices of the society in which they are integrated (Hélot 2014). The choice of those languages had therefore the aim of redefining the boundaries imposed by the schools' curricula to make room for all the linguistic repertoires spoken in the class (home languages) and also to open reflection on languages that are not known to all pupils, putting everyone on an equal footing in learning.
The project consisted of a total of eight video-recorded meetings of two hours each. Results will be presented and discussed, mainly showing how children at this age were able to show metalinguistic awareness and cognition throughout each step of the project. Results therefore show that even at this age, kids are able to have linguist's eyes, as older kids studied by Andorno & Sordella (2020).
Andorno, Cecilia, Sordella, Silvia, 2018. Usare le lingue seconde nell'educazione linguistica: una sperimentazione nella scuola primaria nello spirito dell'Éveil aux langues. In De Meo, Anna e Margaret Rasulo (a cura di), Usare le lingue seconde. Studi AItLA 7,211-233.
Andorno, Cecilia 2020. Quando i bambini fanno i linguisti. Osservare la competenza metalinguistica in un laboratorio di Éveil aux langues. ItalianoLinguaDue,2,352-369.
Candelier M., Camilleri-Grima A., Castellotti V., De Pietro J., Lorincz I., Meissner F.J., Noguerol A., Schroder-Sura A., Molonié M., 2012, Le CARAP, Centre Européen pour les Langues Vivantes, Graz.
Cummins, Jim. 2021. Rethinking the Education of Multilingual Learners. Multilingual Matters.
Hélot, Christine, 2014. Rethinking Bilingual Pedagogy in Alsace: Translingual writers and translanguaging, in A. Blackledge and A. Creese (eds) Heteroglossia as Practice and Pedagogy, Springer,217-238.
