Exploring tutors’ communicative strategies in plurilingual academic contexts: a multilayered analysis

This article examines how tutors support meaning-making and manage linguistic diversity in an intercomprehension (IC) context within higher education. Drawing on data from an online IC course involving Italian and Argentinian veterinary students, the study analyses tutors’ communicative practices during lectures. The analysis adopts a qualitative approach and focuses on prototypical episodes characterised by specialised vocabulary and moments of negotiation of meaning. Tutors’ interventions are examined across three interconnected analytical levels. At the micro level, tutors deploy a range of linguistic and interactional strategies, including reformulation, verification of comprehension, encouragement, and evaluative acts, as well as prosodic adjustments, to sustain mutual understanding. At the meso level, these local strategies contribute to mediation processes through which tutors organise interaction, facilitate conceptual reasoning, and foster a shared plurilingual communicative space. At the macro level, tutors’ practices reflect a pedagogical orientation that values linguistic diversity as a resource and promotes collaborative knowledge construction. Overall, the analysis of these interrelated dimensions highlights the crucial role of teachers in the concrete implementation of a plurilingual curriculum in higher education contexts.