Introducing Age.Vol.A: digital tools to promote communication between seniors, foreign caregivers and families

This presentation introduces Age.Vol.A.– Ageing, Volunteers, Assistants. Multilingual tools for Assisting the Ageing, a research project on ageing issues focusing on the demographic and social situation of Varese, an 80,000-inhabitant city in North-West Italy, with 13% of its population over 65 and foreigners representing over 8% of the province’s population, a significant proportion of whom is employed as caregivers to assist elderly people at home. Age.Vol.A. starts from the assumption that, between home-assisted Italian seniors and their non-Italian caregivers, there exists a linguistic and cultural barrier as well as a digital divide, which tends to increase the physical and social isolation of the elderly population (Russo et al., 2019; Vicentini & Grego, 2019; Vicentini et al., 2020). The paper intends to offer an overview of the output of this research project, i.e. a multilingual website and a multilingual smartphone application aimed at providing the foreign caregivers with terminology and practical information related to their assisted and the institutions aimed to assist those who assist the elderly, from health and healthcare to administrative issues. The terminology is divided into three macro areas – health, institutions, daily life – with secondary fields according to various communicative situations. The concept of the digital tools rests on the notions of translanguaging in migrant communities (Canagarajah, 2013; Hafner & Jones, 2015; Schreiber, 2015) as a means to deploy communication practices which digital tools can support through adaptive moves through linguistic, textual, and audiovisual media. References Canagarajah, S. (2013) “Negotiating Translingual Literacy: An Enactment.” Research in the Teaching of English 48(1):40–67. Hafner, C. A., & Jones, R. H. (2015). Digital literacies and language learning. Language Learning & Technology, 19(3), 1–7. Russo, D., Luraschi, M., Grego, K., Vicentini, A., Pasquaré Mariotto, F., Rovelli, G. (2019) “Designing a Survey for Care Workers, the Elderly and Their Families”, presentation at the conference Seniors, foreign caregivers, families, institutions: Linguistic and multidisciplinary perspectives, University of Insubria, Varese, Italy, 9-10/04/2019. Schreiber. B. R. (2015). “I am what I am”: Multilingual identity and digital translanguaging. Language Learning & Technology, 19(3), 69–87. Vicentini, A., Grego, K. (2019) (eds) “Linguistic perspectives on ageing issues, ethics and ideology”, Expressio, 3. Vicentini, A., Grego, K., Russo, D., Grechi, D., Pasquaré-Mariotto, F. & Rovelli, G. (2020). “Sociolinguistic and statistical methods to improve health communication between the elderly, caregivers and institutions: The Age.Vol.A. research project”. presentation at the conference Communication, Medicine and Ethics Conference (COMET) 2020, Aalborg (DK), 01-03/07/2020.