L’educazione plurilingue, tra partecipazione attiva e resistenze degli alunni

Starting from the concept of local relevance, as highlighted by the scholar Henry Widdowson with regard to the speakers’ experience of (their) languages, this paper focuses on two excerpts of classroom interaction displaying contingent manifestations of pupils’ resistance to activities that involve family languages. Data are taken from a corpus collected within a pilot action – framed in a larger European project, NEW ABC – on the integration of linguistic plurality in school activities. Through a sequential and multimodal conversational analysis, we highlight how pupils’ resistance enacts interactional dynamics around languages, speakers and their competence, as well as the implications that arise from this with respect to plurilingual education at school.