Teaching writing across languages in the Italian secondary school. An intervention-based study with learners of German as a third foreign language and effects in a plurilingual perspective

This paper presents an intervention carried out in the context of a research on the teaching of argumentative writing to Italian-speaking secondary school learners of German as a third foreign language after English and French. The study was designed with the dual aim of testing the hypothesis of an improvement in writing performance in German and in the other foreign languages. To this end, a mixed-methods approach was adopted and various empirical data were collected, including a plurilingual corpus of argumentative texts written by learners in German, English, French and Italian before and after the intervention. The article discusses some theoretical foundations of plurilingual writing in relation to the possibilities of teaching argumentative writing in an educational setting. In this context, a writing arrangement embedded in the teaching of German as a tertiary language is presented. Finally, writing processes and strategies are examined from a cross-linguistic perspective through a partial analysis of the data collected during the research study. The paper concludes with some reflections on the role of foreign language teachers in promoting plurilingual writing in the school context.