Conference Program

The border region of South Tyrol in northern Italy has three official languages and three separate education systems (Glück et al., 2019). While the German and the Italian systems are monolingual, with the respective other language offered only as a second language, the Ladin education system is trilingual from kindergarten to secondary school. Subjects are taught equally in German and Italian, and Ladin is added for communication purposes and taught as a subject. The significance of multilingual picturebooks in educational contexts in this lived multilingualism is examined using the example of the joint reception of a bilingual German-Italian picturebook based on the question of what scope for imagination, participation and mutual understanding it creates.

A second-grade class at a Ladin primary school is getting to know the additive bilingual picturebook ‘Die Heule Eule – La civetta Disperetta’ by Paul Friester and Philippe Goossens (2018) in a shared and dialogic reading aloud. The book is characterised by its experientiality (Fludernik, 1996) and uses a series of basic literary motifs such as loneliness and community, sadness and despair, comfort and hope, belonging and security. The audio and video recorded and conversationally transcribed conversations and multimodal interactions (Selting et al., 2010) are interpreted using key incident analysis (Kroon & Sturm, 2007). Against the backdrop of resonance theory (Rosa, 2019) and empirical research on literacy and literature education (Batini, 2023; Daly, 2021; Giusti, 2025; Hoffmann, 2025; Murrey et al., 2022; Naujok, 2023; Wieler, 2024), the analyses explore the opportunities for participation and spaces for resonance opened up by multilingual shared reading aloud discussions, with the aim of reconstructing linguistic, literary and aesthetic learning processes. The data is part of the empirical-qualitative project ‘IMAGO. Picturebooks – multilingual, rhyming and wordless – in kindergartens and primary schools in South Tyrol’ (Hoffmann, 2023) and provides ethnographic insight into everyday teaching and literature educational practices.

The paper starts with giving an insight into the theoretical background of resonance theory and providing an overview of findings of the empirical research on reading engagement and classroom interaction with picturebooks, before introducing the complex multilingual situation in South Tyrol and the research design of the IMAGO study. The focus is on the analysis of selected key incidents from the shared reading aloud discussions, from which the multi-layered learning processes of children growing up multilingually are reconstructed. In particular, the common multilingual practices and orientation on mutual understanding become visible. An outlook on literary multilingualism in educational contexts concludes the contribution.