Il plurilinguismo negli studenti analfabeti e bassamente scolarizzati in lingua madre: uno studio di caso

Plurilingualism in Illiterate and Low-Educated Students: A Case Study Interlinguistic competence, the ability to “use, in social communication, different languages for different purposes with different levels of proficiency” (Beacco and Byram 2007, 19), focuses on multilingual communication in daily interaction and on the different ways in which speakers seek to achieve concrete communication goals. Migrant students often have a large multilingual repertoire (Caon and Brichese 2019) that must be taken into account and valued (CoE 2017). Many of them come from multilingual societies in which people communicate in two or more languages in daily exchanges, using different repertoires depending on purpose and context: the mother tongue in private exchanges with the family, the official language in public exchanges. The contribution will briefly present, after a theoretical framework of the topic, the results of a case study carried out in a group of Pre-A1 level (illiterate and low educated) of Italian as a Second Language Classes for asylum-seekers and refugee students, in which the use of the different linguistic repertoires of the students was observed, both, in the teacher-student interaction and in the student-student interaction.