Session Information
31 ONLINE 21 A, Linguistic Landscapes for Language Awareness: Teacher Perspectives from across Europe
Symposium
MeetingID: 884 5312 4501 Code: 8n5e0T
Contribution
Signifying the “visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region” (Landry and Bourhis 1997, p. 23), the linguistic landscape (LL) not only tells us which languages are present in our surroundings, it also indexes the symbolic construction of settings and spaces; linguistic landscaping thus presents us with “a set of appropriate methods for learning about society from linguistic facts” (Ben-Rafael and Ben-Rafael 2019, ix). Language visibility can affirm the plurality of contemporary societies and raise language awareness (Gorter & Cenoz, 2016), which is a relevant feature and goal of language learning in contemporary European classrooms (e.g. Candelier, 2015). Language awareness, broadly defined as explicit knowledge about language, is a consciousness of the forms and functions of language (e.g. Svalberg, 2007; Carter, 2003). As such, it is considered a key skill for language acquisition, social communication and intercultural competence (e.g. Byram, 2012; Little, 1997; Bialystok, 1991). The LL may serve to contextualise and anchor language-learning activities by linking them with real-world practices and expressions (cf. Dagenais, Moore, Bullock, Lamarre & Armand, 2009).
The three papers included in this symposium, coming from different country and (language) learning perspectives, consider the potential of the LL in raising language awareness. While research in this area has focused on students, this symposium places special emphasis on teachers (cf. Andrews, 2003), among other actors. Paper 1 considers the interrelation between student, teacher and policymaker beliefs about the Frisian language, an officially recognised minority language in the Netherlands, and the potential of the LL for raising awareness and therefore improving attitudes towards it. Improved attitudes are linked with improved performance. Following this, an interdisciplinary study from Portugal describes the use of an app, developed especially for teachers and students to document and critically reflect on LLs using inter alia gamification features. This paper reports how Portuguese teachers could improve their skills and knowledge as they became linguistic landscapers, along with their students, using mobile technology. Emphasis on the LL for raising language awareness is also taken up in the third paper, however with the caveat that monolingual mindsets may persist alongside the implementation of LL-oriented, and therefore pluralistic, approaches. Shifting to the foreign-language classroom, this paper from Germany presents an in-depth discourse analysis of interviews conducted with teachers of French who had used LLs in their practice. It is shown how teachers’ extant subject knowledge comes into tension with their developing knowledge as their language awareness is raised via the LL.
This symposium addresses regional minority and foreign-language issues in teaching and learning in Europe; it also describes how the LL may be utilised for other subjects via interdisciplinary work. Moreover, in the three national contexts presented, the respective LLs are characterised by the visibility of migrant languages, which were a significant aspect of the three studies described here and are present in societies across Europe. The perspectives offered in this symposium should enrich our understanding of LLs for learning, having tested new approaches (i.e. by bringing the ‘outside’ world of the LL inter alia via mobile technology into the classroom) and examined some of the tensions that may arise vis-à-vis long-held attitudes and more traditional pedagogies.
References
Andrews, S. (2003). Teacher Language Awareness and the Professional Knowledge Base of the L2 Teacher. Language Awareness 12(2): 81-95. Ben-Rafael, E. and Ben-Rafael, M. (2019). Multiple Globalizations: Linguistic Landscapes in World-Cities. Leiden: Brill. Bialystok, E. (1991). Metalinguistic Dimensions in Bilingual Language Proficiency. In: E. Bialystok (ed.) Language Processing in Bilingual Children (pp. 113-140). Cambridge. Byram, M. (2012). Language awareness and (critical) cultural awareness – relationships, comparisons and contrasts. Language Awareness: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09658416.2011.639887?src=recsys Candelier, M. (2015). “Awakening to Languages” and Educational Language Policy. In J. Cenoz, D. Gorter, & S. May (eds.), Language Awareness and Multilingualism. Springer International Publishing. Carter, R. (2003). Language Awareness. ELT Journal 57(1): 64-65. Dagenais, D., Moore, D., Sabatier, C., Lamarre, P. & Armand, F. (2009). Linguistic landscape and language awareness. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (eds.), Linguistic Landscape: Expanding the Scenery (pp. 253-269). Routledge. Gorter, D., & Cenoz, J. (2016). Linguistic Landscape and Multilingualism. In J. Cenoz, D. Gorter, & S. May (eds.), Language Awareness and Multilingualism (pp. 233–245). Springer International Publishing. Landry, R. and Bourhis, R.Y. (1997). Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality: An Empirical Study. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 16(1): 23-49. Little, D. (1997). Language Awareness and the Autonomous Language Learner. Language Awareness 6(2-3): 93-104. Svalberg, A.M.L. (2007). Language Awareness and Language Learning. Language Teaching 40(4): 287-308.
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