L’alfabetizzazione nella classe plurilingue. Un’indagine a Bologna

The paper analyses multilingual practices in the primary schools of Bologna (Italy). More specifically, we investigate the linguistic repertoires of a sample of 78 students, as well as their self-assessments of their reading-writing skills. The analysis is based on a questionnaire administered in 11 highly multilingual classrooms, in which at least 60% of the students spoke more than one language. The results show that, on the one hand, Italian is indicated as part of the linguistic repertoire by almost all the interviewees; on the other hand, the majority of the students reported to have high-level reading-writing skills in Italian, regardless of the composition of their linguistic repertoire. Finally, we present the preliminary results of a writing task in Italian that we administered to a sub-sample of students, in order to verify the impact of multilingualism on writing skills through the comparison between the written production of multilingual and monolingual speakers.