Linguistic Landscapes Educational Spac

How do written and other signs shape our educational spaces and practices; and how, in turn, are these written and other signs shaped by the educational spaces and practices they inhabit? Building on enquiries into the linguistic landscapes of public spaces, this volume addresses these questions and thereby further advances the educational turn in linguistic and semiotic landscapes studies. Prompted by social changes associated with migration and superdiversity, as well as imperatives to promote pluri- and multilingualism, the studies collected here speak to the interest of researchers and practitioners in educational linguistics and educational sciences. They confirm the value of combining empirical analyses of linguistic and semiotic educationscapes with action research on mobilising linguistic landscapes as pedagogical resources to promote multilingual equality.

This book builds upon the growing field of Linguistic Landscape in order to demonstrate the power of a spatialized approach to language, culture, and literacy education as it opens classrooms and cultivates new competencies. The chapters develop major themes, including re-imagining language curricula, language classrooms, and schoolscapes in dialogue with the heteroglossic discourses of the local; developing L2 learners’ symbolic, translingual competencies through engagement with situated, multimodal texts; fostering critical social awareness through language study in the linguistic landscape; expanding opportunities for situated L2 reading and writing; and cultivating language students’ capacities for engaged scholarship and research in out-of-class contexts. By exploring the pedagogical possibilities of place-based approaches to literacy development, this volume contributes to the reimagining of language education through the linguistic landscape.

Linguistic landscapes can play an important role in educating individuals beyond formal pedagogical environments. This book argues that anywhere can be a space for people to learn from displayed texts, images, and other communicated signs, and consequently a space where teachable cultural moments are created. Following language learning trajectories that 'exit through the language classroom' into city streets, public offices, museums and monuments, this volume presents innovative work demonstrating that anyone can learn from the linguistic landscape that surrounds them. Offering a bridge between theoretical research and practical application, chapters consider how we make sense of places by understanding how the landscape is used to express, claim and contest identities and ideologies. In this way, Linguistic Landscapes Beyond the Language Classroom highlights the unexpected potential of the informal settings for learning and for teachers to expand their students' intercultural experience.

This book offers an international account of the use of linguistic landscapes to promote multilingual education, from primary school to the university, and in teacher education programs. It brings linguistic landscapes to the forefront of multilingual education in school settings and teacher education, expanding the disciplinary domains through which they have been studied. Drawing on multidisciplinarity and placing linguistic landscapes in the field of language (teacher) education, this book presents empirical studies developed in eleven countries: Australia, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mozambique, The Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and The United States. The chapters illustrate how multilingual pedagogies can be enhanced using linguistic landscapes in mainstream education and are written by partners of the Erasmus Plus project LoCALL “LOcal Linguistic Landscapes for global language education in the school context”.

Addressing a wide range of issues in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and multilingualism, this volume focuses on language users, the ‘people.’ Making creative connections between existing scholarship in language policy and contemporary theory and research in other social sciences, authors from around the world offer new critical perspectives for analyzing language phenomena and language theories, suggesting new meeting points among language users and language policy makers, norms, and traditions in diverse cultural, geographical, and historical contexts. Identifying and expanding on previously neglected aspects of language studies, the book is inspired by the work of Elana Shohamy, whose critical view and innovative work on a broad spectrum of key topics in applied linguistics has influenced many scholars in the field to think “out of the box” and to reconsider some basic commonly held understandings, specifically with regard to the impact of language and languaging on individual language users rather than on the masses.

This open access volume offers valuable new perspectives on the question of how mobility, locatedness and immersion in the physical world can enhance second language teaching and learning. It does so through a diverse array of empirical studies of language, literacy, and culture learning in the linguistic landscape of visible and audible public discourse. Written from conceptually rich and disciplinarily varied perspectives, its ten chapters address methodological and practical problems of relating language learning to the lived and rapidly changing places of the late modern world. Whether it is within the four walls of a school, in a nearby multilingual neighborhood, in a virtual telecollaborative space, or in any other location where languages may be learned, this volume highlights different configurations of learning spaces, the leveraging of real-world places for critical learning, and ways to productively ‘dislocate’ language learners from preconceived notions and standardized experiences. Together, these elements create conditions for a language and literacy pedagogy that can be said to be robustly spatialized: linguistically and culturally complex, geographically situated, historically informed, dialogically realized, and socially engaged.

This book explores theories of space and place in relation to autonomy in language learning. Encompassing a wide range of linguistically and culturally diverse learning contexts, this edited collection brings together research papers from academics working in fourteen countries. In their studies, these researchers examine physical, virtual and metaphorical learning spaces from a wide range of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives (semiotic, ecological, complexity, human geography, linguistic landscapes, mediated discourse analysis, sociocultural, constructivist and social constructivist) and methodological approaches. The book traces its origins to the first-ever symposium on space, place and autonomy, which was held at the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) 2014 World Congress in Brisbane. The final chapter, which presents a thematic analysis of the papers in this volume, discusses the implications for theory development, further enquiry, and pedagogical practice.

Elana Shohamy is a professor and chair of the language education program at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University, where she teaches, researches and writes about multiple issues relating to multilingualism: language policy, language testing and language in the public space. --