Building bridges between languages: How students develop crosslinguistic awareness in multilingual learning settings

The present qualitative case study investigates the acquisition of increased crosslinguistic awareness in a multilingual learning setting, and the different development attributable to the linguistic backgrounds of emergent multilingual students. The study was carried out in a secondary school in South Tyrol, belonging to the German-speaking school system, where plurilingual task-based modules were inserted in regular language lessons. The languages involved were: German, Italian, English, French, Latin and Ladin. Students were involved in complex plurilingual problem solving processes during the elaboration of the language production. Thanks to this, crosslinguistic awareness could be trained and fostered, as plurilingual negotiating processes arose from the plurilingual and multimodal input provided by the teacher.