CLIL for minority languages: resources, limits and applicability. A case study on Venetian.

Abstract

Teaching and learning minority languages represents a very important expansion basin for the theories and practices developed by language acquisition studies for official and standardized languages, tough necessarily posing new and more specific problems foreseeably very prone to requiring tailored solutions in practice. In particular, CLIL emerged as a very functional and flexible methodology for minority languages teaching. In Italy, the last two decades show how the promotion through teaching in schools of the three newly recognized (1999) indigenous languages can be manyfold, on the axes of acceptance, feasibility and effectiveness. Those experiences in a societal and institutional context comparable to the Venetian situation (although not legally recognized yet), along with other relevant cases worldwide must be treasured. The maturation of recent events in activism, institutions and schools in Venetia started to outline the possibility of teaching Venetian in schools. A questionnaire has thus been designed to ask school teachers for the first time their qualified opinion on several topics of concern: acceptability, teaching methods, didactic materials, feasibility, personal sentiment, sociolinguistic environment. Results show a rather clear picture of the current perception of the topic traced by those actors who would be in charge of teaching: a map than can guide policy makers to move on already accepted routes and to spot high mountains, to be avoided or to be climbed.