ELF as a self-translation practice: towards a pedagogy of contact in the Italian as a Foreign Language (IFL) classroom

This research reports on a project which was conducted in Puglia (Southern Italy) from September 2016 to March 2017. It involved a series of lesson observations and interviews with Italian L2 teachers working for the SPRAR project (‘Sistema di Protezione per Richiedenti Asilo e Rifugiati’) and for some NGOs that cooperate in the regional management of the migrant crisis. The teachers involved in the research project teach Italian as L2 to Multicultural and Multilingual Native Speakers from a variety of countries, who share the legal status of refugees. They are symbolically called upon to serve as the bridge between the cultures the migrants have left behind and the new host culture, which is often perceived as hostile. In line with Canagarajah’s translingual theory (2013), we maintain that individuals – especially the migrants - are not only capable of but also in need of adapting to new communicative practices in order to negotiate, mediate and adapt to the new changing paradigms of the contemporary world. The paradigm of ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec 2007) helps us to consider that the emerging phenomena of translingual social contact generated by globalisation, mobility and migration is encouraging the proposal of new theoretical and practical concepts. The deterritorialised and transidiomatic ‘supergroup’ (Vertovec, 2007; Blommaert & Rampton, 2011) of IFL (Italian as a Foreign Language) teachers and their migrant students represents the complex arena of new social and linguistic research debates, since it problematises the relationship between linguistic communities and nation-states, and between the systematic knowledge of languages and their relationships to other cultures.