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Whereas in many European countries multilingual education has been questioned as a useful means of learning languages there are some exceptional contexts where trilingual education has been practiced for many years. In South Tyrol in the Ladin kindergartens children are taught German, Italian and Ladin from an early age on.
In the MELA (mehrsprachig ladinisch) study which was carried out in the Ladin kindergartens and primary schools the complexity of multilingual development involving all three languages and their interactions have been studied. The study is based on the theoretical framework of the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism (Herdina & Jessner 2002) which presents the first book publication applying a Complexity Dynamic Systems Theory Approach to multilingualism. It works with a holistic approach linking the linguistic, the cognitive and the social level of exploration (Jessner 2023).
Following up on my plenary lecture in 2019 in which I presented the results of the kindergarten study in this talk the results of the large scale longitudinal study involving the same children on their way from kindergarten to primary schools in two Ladin valleys will be discussed.