Una figura da ri-definire. Il mediatore linguistico e culturale

In this article, we would like to present a general state of the art of the research that has been conducted in the last few years in the field of interlinguistic and intercultural mediation. We will then specify the contribution that language education could bring to the concept of cultural and linguistic mediation and the training of intercultural mediators. Mediation has been employed in different areas (administrative and juridical, health care and social assistance, schools and educations etc.) and it is defined by Luatti (2011) as «a particular type of intervention that takes place in social and local contexts, characterized by the presence of migrant populations where people who do not share the same language and culture come into contact and communicate». Due to the big heterogeneity of this topic, widely studied in different scientific research fields (such as sociology, anthropology, linguistics and pedagogy), and due to the language education nature of this article, we will select researches and investigations about mediation that, according to us, could be useful to complement our studies in language education and intercultural communication.