Bridging the Gap between Policies and Practices Related to Multilingualism in Schools in Southern European States

For the last twenty years at least, the promotion of plurilingualism have constituted an important priority on the agenda of European institutions: language has acquired an obvious strategic role in mapping out the European model of citizenship, democratic participation and competitiveness in the knowledge society. However, a more analytical consideration of the progress achieved so far is required, in order to understand how the exhortations of the European institutions in favour of pluri- and multilingualism have been implemented by educational authorities of individual States and also to better understand the impact of these actions. In particular, it is worth asking whether national policies are really fostering both plurilingualism and multilingualism per se, or whether they are oriented towards a more limited goal, privileging individual plurilingualism over a more long-term and socially productive model of multilingualism, which may be conducive to an effective “integration” of the linguistic diversity brought about by so-called “immigrant languages”. Such a research question is particularly relevant with regard to the direction that some European national educational systems are choosing as far as the linguistic integration of pupils with a migrant background is concerned. This is the case of five Southern European countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Slovenia, Malta) which have recently become immigration destinations, whilst, in the past, they experienced significant mass migration. In the light of the above, in this paper we discuss whether, at a macro-level, educational policies promote plurilingualism and linguistic diversity efficiently in these countries, and whether teachers’ attention is drawn to such phenomena brought about by migration. At a micro-level, we consider if plurilingualism and linguistic diversity are part of everyday classroom activities in order to create a learning environment which fosters interlinguistic and intercultural awareness