‛我的…futuro?': Multilingual Practices Shaping Classroom Interaction in Italian Mainstream Education

This chapter explores translanguaging interactions across primary-school classes included in the project ‛L’AltRoparlante’, which started in 2016, including five public schools in Italy. The aim of the project is to leverage students’ multilingual repertoires by embracing translanguaging as a pedagogical resource, with the extended aim of transforming the school environments in terms of equality and ecology of languages and cultures (García & Li Wei, 2014; Hult, 2012). We begin by providing a review of language policies in Italy as regards students with a migrant background, mostly focusing on the tension between an emergency approach (Favaro 2014) based on monolingualism (Italian) and a more inclusive view of students’ multilingual repertoires, supported also by national curricula. By taking into account the most relevant national investigations and the influence of the pluralistic approaches promoted by the Council of Europe, we will consider potential pathways to integrate translanguaging pedagogy into the Italian mainstream teaching praxis in primary school. We then introduce the L’AltRoparlante project and briefly describe the school contexts. In connection with this, we show how CUNY-NYSIEB, Initiatives on Emergent Bilinguals (García & Sánchez, 2018) was used as a foundation when implementing pedagogical translanguaging in ‘L’AltRoparlante’. We will as well describe the trajectory of adaptation of the USA translanguaging model into the Italian education system, considering similarities and differences with other European projects. We then focus on the analysis of translanguaging interactions occurring in class, aiming at tracing the progression of the development of teachers’ translanguaging strategies in their interaction with students and researchers. Our data consist of about 50 hours of video-recordings, mainly concerned with multilingual text-based activities (Cummins & Early, 2011), content-based instruction and moments of students’ cooperative work. Illustrative excerpts will be analyzed with Conversation Analytic methods (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson, 1974), with the purpose of showing verbal and non-verbal features involved in the negotiation of situated translanguaging interactions. We show that teachers and students shape classroom interaction through different interactional and multilingual strategies, such as translation, peer-to-peer mediation, word recall, metalinguistic and cross-linguistic considerations. Teachers who do not know their students’ languages tend to employ multimodal support and to re-construct teacher-student roles, whereas teachers with limited command of one or more of the students’ languages use these to prompt translanguaging interactions. We conclude by discussing the implications of researchers’ and teachers’ agency in transforming educational and conversational praxis through translanguaging, in order to develop more equitable education.