‘Pensiero ecologizzante’ ed educazione linguistica: l’apporto dell’intercomprensione
‘Ecological Thinking’ and Language Education: the Contribution of Intercomprehension

Summary/Abstract: According to Bateson, ideas, mentalities and cultures are ‘living systems’. They are the result of an interconnection, of a balance, and these are comparable to what happens to physical ecosystem. Moreover, Bateson argues that their relationship seems to be more important than their own identity. Later on, Morin and Bauman state that the aim of a linguistic education, whose aim is to affect the growth of an 'ecological' cognitive society, must be the formation of a structure of thought capable of managing complexity. According to these authors, ecological though must be ‘mobile’, it must be able to observe the relational dimension of identity and to sustain uncertainty and relativity. Intercomprehension methodology ensures innovative and effective language training stimulating the renewal of thought: in fact, the methodology trains a constant ‘repositioning’ of one’s own identity, both cognitive and emotional, thanks to the contact with the many ‘other’ linguistic identities offered by the multilingual approach. This theoretical background has become our point of reference since the very beginning of our teaching practice in intercomprehension. That’s why we decided to integrate EuRom5 with an additional multilingual input that would allow students to work on different cultural narrations of the same content. By working on articles selected from Euronews.com, the learner was able to capitalize the comprehension of a certain content through a sequence of readings in different languages. The ‘comparative’ sequence of the task allowed learners to optimize the cognitive effort dedicated to understanding ‘what is said’, and to reflecting on the different cultural representations of an event or information (the ‘how it is said’). In other words, we were able to integrate linguistic comprehension with intercultural observation of language use, focusing on the perception of the author’s communicative intention and on the underlying discourse, and on how this can be reflected by language (lexical choices and / or a different organization of the text).The integration of intercultural and linguistic goals has been maintained also in a more recent ‘second level’ course, activated in 2019. The course provides a larger variety of languages (some minor romance languages are included) and a greater variety of comprehension activities, for the benefit of progressive consolidation of metalinguistic awareness and resiliency.

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