Which Terminology for Multilingual Communication in Language Pedagogy?

Abstract

The actual multilingual society, deriving from an augmented personal and professional mobility, and from the migratory growing phenomena of the last decades, requires to its citizens a solid linguistic communicative expertise. Plurilingualism has become an unavoidable need, more than an additional skill. Experts in Language Pedagogy from different linguistic backgrounds are called to develop the theoretical principles for an effective multilingual didactics and teachers, from their side, are called to train themselves on these principles and to apply them in the language classroom. An effective multilingual didactics requires high qualitative standards in Language Pedagogy. Being this latter a relatively recent science (Cambiaghi, 2008), and an interdisciplinary one, it has not yet developed a standard shared terminology. This has led to confusion and disagreement among scholars about the meaning to be attributed to meta-didactic terms, and among practioners that have to apply these concepts.

This study aims at filling this requirement of terminological clarity and transparency, developing an original multilingual glossary (Italian, English and German) of Language Pedagogy terminology, thus favouring inter-comprehension and interaction among experts through terminological standardization. Terminology is an essential component of each discipline, since it shapes its contents and outilines its evolution. Then an effort has to be done to develop a common metalanguage of Language Pedagogy. Even if it exists some resources, they are generally monolingual and still too related to their cultural area of origins. The glossary described in the present study constitutes a shared digital platform for experts and students, easily accessible and constantly updated. The 130 terms and expressions included at the moment, are alphabetically disposed and provided with translations, definitions, hyperlinks and examples. Lemmas derive from the comparison of three relevant European documents for Language Pedagogy and have been selected only when appearing in at least two out of three of them.