"Intercultural Settings for Language Mediation: Evaluation of a Research Project on Language Mediator Training through Theatre"

Language mediation is acquiring more and more importance, especially in social and immigration contexts. However, the figure of language mediator has not been defined yet from a professional point of view and there are still some problems of methodology as far as training is concerned. In order to propose an innovative curriculum for language mediator training, a three-stage research project was developed and carried out in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Translation, Languages and Cultures (SITLeC) of the University of Bologna. The aim of this project, based on the teaching/acquisition of intercultural communicative competence through theatre, was to help students in becoming intercultural speakers and in reaching the mental flexibility necessary to cope with a wide range of communicative situations, both from a verbal, non-verbal and cultural perspective. For this purpose, teaching activities were designed on the basis of the cultural and social domains observed from the contemporary dramatic texts selected in the first stage of the project. These activities were applied to two different domains, namely an Oral Language Mediation module (collaborative classroom, curricular training) and a theatre workshop (extracurricular training) of a School for Interpreters and Translators (University of Bologna at Forlì). In this paper we present the results of our research project, based on the observation of data (open observations, evaluation questionnaires, audio-video recording of activities, etc.) collected in both domains. After an in-depth analysis of results we have concluded that, in most cases, students have acquired an effective intercultural communicative competence and have developed the cognitive and emotional competences necessary to their future profession.