Activating Linguistic Repertoires and Multilingual Competencies in the “Language Village”

Building on current developments in multilingualism research and didactics, our contribution aims to show how language repertoires and multilingual competence can be activated in the didactic scenario of a "Language Village". This experimental setting contains five multilingual stations at which the pupils cope with different tasks and problems in more than ten working languages. The tasks include various modalities such as intercomprehension, mediation and polyglot dialogue which are integrated in connection with receptive and productive as well as conceptually written and oral tasks, featuring a wide variety of materials and interaction situations in order to enable the widest possible range of approaches, strategies, and ways of expression. Our qualitative study in the context of the three-year project "RepertoirePluS" refers to data of 131 pupils from South Tyrolean secondary schools with German or Italian language of instruction as well as language parity schools in the Ladin valleys. Our contribution will answer the following questions: How can a "Language Village" be used as a didactic concept to activate language repertoires? Which multilingual competences can be observed within such a "Language Village"? How can a "Language Village" also be integrated in a school context to promote the multilingualism of all pupils and their entire linguistic repertoires? Our study aims to contribute to the research of multilingual practices in the sense of activating linguistic repertoires and to present the "Language Village" as a possibility for the integrated conception of multilingual didactics. In addition, the aim is to establish a link to the discussion on multilingual curricula and the collection and assessment of multilingual competencies.