Conference Program

The Council of Europe (CoE) recognizes Service Learning (SL) as pedagogical approach that can develop the full range of Competences for Democratic Culture connecting learning, critical understanding and meaningful civic action (CoE, 2018a). These competences are featured as values, attitudes, skills, knowledge and critical understanding that students need in order to live as active democratic citizens (CoE, 2018b). Some of these competences, such as knowledge and critical understanding of language and communication, linguistic, communicative and plurilingual skills, valuing cultural diversity and openness to cultural otherness, link to the field of Language Education with a specific focus on Plurilingual Education (PE). Indeed, PE is essential to education for Democratic Culture; it encourages critical reflection on cultural diversity and promotes language awareness and students’ full linguistic repertoire (language of schooling, home and additional languages), valuing their voice in all languages (CoE, 2022).

PE has gained great relevance within Language Education in the light of the Multilingual turn in education (May, 2014) and the shift from monolingual to plurilingual perspective prompted in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CoE, 2001, 2020). This innovative change has led to the conceptualization of “Plurilingual Competence” conceived as a set of skills, knowledge and attitudes which shares common features with the Competences for Democratic Culture previously mentioned (Candelier et al., 2012).

In this theoretical framework SL could be a valuable pedagogical reference for PE, considering the importance within this field to encourage pedagogical approaches that empower learners, value their voice and develop their autonomy, critical thinking skills, and language and cultural awareness (CoE, 2022, p.16). Despite its value, there is still the need of further empirical studies on the implementation of SL in the foreign language classroom (Rauschert, 2022), especially when referring to primary school students (Porto, 2023) and the plurilingual perspective in Educational Linguistics (Baker, 2019).

This paper refers to a PhD research project which has been carried out to fill this empirical gap. The research features an exploratory case study involving 42 primary school students, two teachers and community partners settled in northern Italy. Students, teachers and community partners have taken part in a SL project with a linguistic focus which has been designed following Fiorin (2016), along with methodologies and approaches within Plurilingual Education (Candelier et al., 2012; Carbonara & Scibetta, 2020; Melo-Pfeifer, 2023). The aim of the study is to gather methodological evidence on the implementation of SL in Plurilingual Education and to study how students’, teachers’ and community partners’ attitudes towards plurilingualism change over the SL project. Qualitative data has been collected with a longitudinal perspective using researcher’s journal, students’ logbooks, linguistic autobiographies, focus groups with students and interviews with teachers and community partners. This communication intends to present a methodological analysis of the SL project with linguistic focus and the preliminary findings on participants’ attitudes towards plurilingualism.