English as a Lingua Franca in a Translanguaging context: an analysis of a Pre-A1 communicative Italian course

Interactions in multicultural contexts are extremely frequent nowadays, this research focuses on a Pre-A1 communicative Italian class at the University of Padua and seeks to analyse the communicative strategies used by the professor and the students, who interact through English as a Lingua Franca. For this reason, this dissertation explores different theories and findings regarding English as a Lingua Franca and its corpus (VOICE). Furthermore, theories on essential strategies for an efficient ELF communication are presented and compared with the data collected during the participant observation carried out. In addition, the case study chosen represents a multicultural learning environment, in which Translanguaging is employed. Thus, this paper illustrates how educators and students use Translanguaging and which are its advantages. The wider purpose of this dissertation is to spread awareness about the way we communicate using English as a Lingua Franca in a learning environment, and to raise the value of a Translanguaging context.