Multilingualism at the primary level in South Tyrol: how does multilingual education affect young learners’ metalinguistic awareness and proficiency in L1, L2 and L3?

The present study looks into the effects of early multilingual education by investigating linguistic knowledge and metalinguistic awareness in young learners at the primary level. The study aims to establish whether children in multilingual education programmes perform higher on a measure of metalinguistic awareness and with regards to their L1 Italian, L2 German and L3 English than children who receive traditional second and foreign language instruction. Two groups of elementary school pupils recruited from 2 Italian institutions in South Tyrol (Italy), each with multilingual and traditional instructional streams, participated in the study. All the participants completed a metalinguistic awareness test (in their L1 Italian), a German and an English test. The results of the study show the significant positive effects of early multilingual learning and a clear overall superiority for the subjects in the multilingual programmes as compared to those in the regular programmes. The results provide support not only for the effectiveness of multilingual education but also for cognitive advantages in multilingual children.