Sistemi di scrittura e lingue a confronto attraverso la lettura. Promuovere la competenza interculturale alla Scuola dell’Infanzia

When children approach a written text to comprehend its meaning, they formulate various ideas and hypotheses. They recognize the social function of different texts, compare text and images, and analyze the qualitative and quantitative aspects of writing. Within this framework, the present study explores how the comparison between different types of writing systems and languages promotes intercultural competence and emergent literacy in preschool settings. The qualitative analysis described herein was conducted based on verbal interactions recorded during the exploration and reading of the same text in different languages, or of multilingual texts, across three preschools characterized by a high percentage of students with migrant backgrounds. The collected data highlight the students’ ability to perceive the diversity of non-Latin writing systems and to develop profound linguistic reflections on the Latin writing system, using Italian as the graphic reference norm. Among the most evident outcomes are the celebration of diversity and the recognition of language as an identity marker–the result of a process of cognitive decentering.