Strategien zur Förderung von Mehrsprachigkeit in Deutschlehrwerken für die italienische Scuola Media

Plurilinguism has been given a new emphasis both in the debate in professional circles and in the documents produced by the Italian Ministry of Education, so it is appopriate that the development of plurilingual competence should become an important building block of foreign language teaching. Since teachers use textbooks as a guide, almost as a „curriculum“, they play an important role in the development of plurilingual teaching. The aim of the present study is to analyse the textbooks for German as a foreign language used in the first class of the Italian Scuola Media in order to examine the extent to which they promote plurilingualism. Italian pupils in this class are learning a further foreign language, after English, for the first time. The article gives a theoretical overview of important issues for plurilingual didactics as well as for textbooks and textbook analyses, followed by the formulation of the research questions for this study. It concludes with the presentation and discussion of the results.