The effect of multilingual pedagogies on language aptitude: A study on lower secondary school students based on the LLAMA test

The paper presents an explorative study regarding the relation between multilingual pedagogies and language aptitude, a complex construct associated with metalinguistic awareness cognitive processes, which predict capacity of learning foreign language. We administered LLAMA test to 67 lower secondary school students in Italy, divided into two groups: target group had been regularly exposed éveil aux langues (awakening languages) translanguaging practices, explicit focuses on crosslinguistic reflection, for prior four years; control has regular monolingual instruction. Results show that achieved better score sub-tests (sound-symbol correspondence task grammatical inferencing task). A composite pattern correlations predictors influence Italian competence English are also analysed disentangled. Finally, discusses implications these results terms research educational perspectives.