ITALIANO E DIALETTO: ESPERIENZE DIDATTICHE PER UN CURRICOLO VERTICALE INTEGRATO IN PROSPETTIVA ECOLINGUISTICA

Italian and local varieties at school: teaching experiences for an integrated vertical curriculum from an ecolinguistic perspective National guidelines and policies for the valorisation and protection of linguistic minorities and the heritage of local varieties call on schools to explore new educational pathways that integrate multilingual teaching (Italian, other languages and local varieties), in order to promote the students’ cultural and social competence, the development of their identity through the contact with linguistic and cultural diversity and democratic participation. This paper presents two experiences of integrated language teaching through the valorisation of local varieties for a vertical curriculum based on an ecolinguistic perspective, carried out in primary and secondary school classes of schools from an area near Palermo. In a primary school (class III), composed of Italian speakers with low competence in the local variety, the study of text types in Italian and the search for similar texts in Sicilian, carried out with the involvement of Sicilian-speaking grandparents, improved text analysis and communication skills and widened intergenerational language spaces. At secondary level, the students’ multilingual resources on Italian and the local variety allowed the discovery of the onomastic local repertoire and the creation of glossaries; the contrastive analysis activated metalinguistic processes and improved skills in dealing with different registers.