What is the "linguistic landscape" as a phenomenon in the world, and as a field of study? What educational opportunities does it offer to students and teachers, especially in contexts of higher education? How has a linguistic landscape perspective informed my teaching practice at San José State University? And, what future opportunities might it hold for SJSU students and South Bay community partnerships?
This essay represents my effort to respond to these questions and more. Collectively, they represent my conviction that "linguistic landscape" offers a powerful framework for relating the teaching and learning of language to human experience in place, history, and society. This text was occasioned by my periodic and tenure reviews in the Department of Linguistics and Language Development at San José State University in 2023, and my desire to more meaningfully articulate questions such as these for my community of colleagues. In this multimodal, expandable medium, I hope to create an accessible resource that can serve as a foundation for continued dialogue, imagination, and professional growth.
Topics
- What is (the) linguistic landscape?
- What educational opportunities does LL afford?
- How does an LL perspective inform my teaching?
- Example 1: Building language awareness for future teachers and linguists (LING 107)
- Example 2: Linguistic landscape as 'soft' introduction to discourse analysis (LING 20)
- References
1. What is (the) linguistic landscape?
As may already be inferred from my parenthetical use of the definite article in the title to this page, the term "linguistic landscape" has been beset with a degree of ambivalence from the start. Although the term appears to have been used since about the 1960s to refer to the general prevalence of certain, usually spoken, languages in a given national or regional setting, it assumed a much more local, material, and visually-grounded identity in a seminal article in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology in 1997. Arguing that the visible presence of a minority language in public space exerts a positive influence upon the "ethnolinguistic vitality" of a community of speakers of that language, Canadian linguists Rodrigue Landry and Richard Bourhis wrote, "The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration" (p. 25).
Since that time, and in the context of increased attention to the material and spatial entanglements of language use in fields such as Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics, Language Policy and Planning, Environmental Psychology, and Urban Studies, "the linguistic landscape" has emerged as a term of convenience to describe the "symbolic construction of public space" (Ben Rafael et al., 2006) through the multiple written languages and other symbolic systems that people use to leave traces, whether lasting or fleeting, of their activities and intents, in public places of all sorts. In this sense, "the linguistic landscape" refers to the visible, audible, and materially anchored language-objects and linguistic practices as they take place in the world.
At the same time, with the increasing scholarly interest in this phenomenon---evidenced in regular conference sessions and workshops, dozens of books, hundreds of journal articles and book chapters, and a dedicated journal---researchers in Linguistics and linguistics-adjacent fields such as those mentioned above began to identify "linguistic landscape" (sometimes capitalized or elaborated as Linguistic Landscape Studies) as an independent field of study. As expressed in the Editors' Introduction of Linguistic Landscape Journal in 2015, "The field of Linguistic Landscape (LL) attempts to understand the motives, uses, ideologies, language varieties and contestations of multiple forms of 'languages' as they are displayed in public spaces." From a variety of disciplinary origins, employing large-scale quantitative to micro-level and qualitative methods, and with motivations ranging from conceptual advancement to political critique to educational innovation, linguistic landscape researchers find common empirical ground in the social practices, performances, and representations of language in the public sphere.
To be sure, the conceptual slippage between "linguistic landscape" as phenomenon-in-the-world, site of research, and field of academic study leaves much to be desired. Over the years, there have been numerous critiques of the term and its assumptions, not least because of the duplicitous nature of the term "landscape," which can refer at times to a scope of view, or to a representation, or to an ideology (or to all three all at once)---and about which geographers and urbanists may be much better positioned than linguists to discuss. Nevertheless, in the linguistic spirit of description over prescription, I continue to use and identify with the term "linguistic landscape" largely because of its continued currency in and beyond the communities of Applied Linguistics with which I affiliate.
2. What educational opportunities does LL afford?
Since at least the 1970s, language and literacy researchers have been interested in the "environmental print" of words, letters, numerals, and symbols as resources for young children to build familiarity with written texts and textual practices. At that time, and today still, highlighting the ways in which emerging readers develop literacy skills by distilling linguistic meanings from holistic experiences in media-rich environments (such as finding names on cereal boxes, or identifying restaurant logos while moving down a street) served as a valuable "whole-language" counterpoint to bottom-up, decontextualized approaches that prioritize students' recognition and assembly of atomistic structures (sounds, letters, words), while having little to say about language as part and parcel of people's motivated social actions.
In the decades since, researchers in Second Language Acquisition and language teaching and learning (closely related but separately interested subfields within Applied Linguistics) have become growingly interested in the ways in which language learning does not take place in a vacuum. Rather, learners of language, whether in institutional settings like ESL classes or informal contexts such as playgrounds or workplaces, must encounter and manipulate linguistic forms in the course of negotiating social relationships, individual interests, and cultural identities in the course of their daily activities. In this sense, place as an ever-changing convergence of people and discourses has come to assume greater importance in the research and practice of language learning and teaching. This conviction is the premise of a significant body of work on spatial literacies within the 40+ year, trans-disciplinary tradition of New Literacy Studies; it is a frequent refrain in recent Second Language Acquisition research, as found in the Douglas Fir Group's (2016) "Transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world," and developed at length in Phil Benson's 2021 book, Language learning environments: Spatial perspectives on SLA; it may also be seen in the elevation of "Communities" to one of five goal areas identified in the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages' World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages.
Within this broader context, a number of sociolinguists and language pedagogues began to apply ideas from the linguistic landscapes paradigm to their own language and literacy classrooms. Leading their students to analyze multilingual neighborhoods, government signage, and advertising campaigns that were visible near their home and school communities, they concluded that the linguistic landscape was not only a source for authentic vocabulary items and illustrations of 'correct' grammar. More significantly, they found that turning students' attention to the linguistic landscape could be useful for such goals as the development of interpersonal pragmatic skills, growing students' intercultural competence, and fostering their awareness of political and cultural considerations that motivate otherwise natural-seeming pairings of language form, meaning, and use in everyday life (see, e.g., Cenoz and Gorter, 2008; Sayer, 2010; Rowland, 2013; Chern and Dooley, 2014). More recent research has demonstrated additional virtues of bringing the linguistic landscape into the language classroom, such as grounding internet-mediated transnational learning exchanges (aka "telecollaboration") in visually rich and historically layered sites (e.g. Richardson, 2020), providing a framework for students to engage in community-based research and sociohistorical critique (Bruzos Moro, 2020), or guiding students to become more attentive to their own cognitive and affective leanings as newcomers to a community (Szabó and Dufva, 2020).
In the international scholarship on linguistic landscape (Linguistic Landscape Studies), interest in educational topics has continued to grow in recent years; this trend may be seen both in terms of practical applications (see Solmaz & Przymus' Linguistic Landscapes in English Language Teaching: A pedagogical guidebook (2021), the outcome of a Turkish-U.S. collaboration that brought together hundreds of K-16 educators in a digital symposium at which I served as a keynote speaker), and in research settings, as evidenced in the educational theme of the most recent (13th) annual gathering of the Linguistic Landscape Workshop at the University of Hamburg, "Semiotic landscapes in educational spaces," where I was also fortunate to give a keynote address.
3. How does an LL perspective inform my teaching?
I arrived at San José State University in the fall of 2018 with formal training in communicative language teaching in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), and several years of teaching English, Japanese, and Korean to adult second language learners. This experience, followed by my PhD studies in language teaching and Applied Linguistics (including teaching and research support for middle and high school media literacy programs), and a decade of work in pedagogical design, support, and research at university-based language centers, left me with two major insights that are germane to the topic at hand. First, the highest-level competencies to be developed in the language classroom---that is, pragmatic, intercultural, symbolic, and literary competencies, among others---require learners to attend to the ways in which the meaning of linguistic forms-in-use is always overdetermined by layers of history, context, affect, intentionality, and more. Put simply, even the simplest of utterances has a world of meaning behind it, and one of the jobs of the language learner is to enter that world. Second, to the degree that language is a central medium through which knowledge about virtually any topic is constructed, debated, and shared in university classrooms, cultivating students' awareness of the powers of language to shape and condition our understanding of the world is a valuable endeavor when teaching in any subject area.
Before encountering any of this professional training and work experience, I was first drawn to the linguistic landscape as a language learner, without ever having hear the term "linguistic landscape," on a visit to Mexico and during a summer study abroad stay in Japan. Like others who draw literacy cues from the environmental print around them, I couldn't help but to notice how unfamiliar labels attached themselves to sometimes familiar, and sometimes new-seeming objects, places, and activities. Stop signs, immediately recognizable for their simplicity, directive force, and seeming ubiquity, were one such place: on my first trip outside the U.S., I was struck that stop signs in Mexico read "ALTA" and not "STOP," as I had been accustomed to my entire life up to that point; later, when I lived in Japan, I was curious that stop signs were the only place where I saw the direct command form of a verb in writing (tomare, rather than the more polite tomatte kudasai that I had learned in class). At the same time, recorded announcements in Japanese train stations taught me how to say "soon," "arrive," "be careful," and any number of other expressions. In this sense, the physical signs of the linguistic landscape helped me learn some of the fundamental structures and patterns in the language, while embedding each in a sensory-rich experience, from which I could draw future associations and comparisons.
As much as I gained from these self-contained language lessons, the most compelling aspect of attending to these signs and sounds in public space was the performative dimension of language, the material fact of public signs and speech marking out social territories---that is, welcoming some and excluding others from a given place---through such functions as advertising, advising, regulating, and prohibiting. And once I began to see these in other languages, in other countries, it became impossible not to see them in my immediate surroundings in California, and even right here in San José. Where they are posted, "MEN" and "WOMEN" bathroom signs reify a binary that presents itself as natural in how it genders the movements and activities of bodies in place; downtown trash cans with poems written by high school students speak to passersby as they wait to cross streets, interpellating them as reflective, responsible caretakers of the city; a mural reading "Vida Abundante" (Abundant Life) on the side of Hotel De Anza in downtown San José not only reminds its viewers of the agricultural past of the region, but also of its rich Mexican heritage and the continued importance of the Spanish language in its communities.
Inviting students to appreciate, critique, and otherwise dialogue with such multilayered performances of place is one of my deepest goals in applying concepts, methods, and examples from Linguistic Landscape Studies into my teaching at SJSU. Below, I offer a few examples of activities I have created for my classes. Where feasible, I have linked to actual assignments, rubrics, and derivative projects that I have carried out over the past several years.
Example 1: Building language awareness for future teachers and linguists (LING 107)
Over the course of the past several semesters, I have developed a weekly language observation assignment for undergraduate and graduate students in my Linguistics 107: Patterns of English course, which teaches basic pedagogical grammar and pronunciation to undergraduate students in education-related programs (primarily Liberal Studies and ChAD), as well as undergraduate and graduate students in Linguistics and TESOL. In order to introduce basic principles of linguistics to a majority of students who had had little experience with formal language study, while balancing the teaching of 'the rules' of grammar with the application of principles of grammar instruction (Phillabaum & Malinowski, 2019), I asked students to begin paying attention to the ways language was actually being used in their immediate environs---at home, at work, in their neighborhoods, in social settings, in other classes at SJSU---and to document and relate what they saw and heard to topics in class. Examples of assignments included capturing examples of 'difficult English sounds' as they impede new English learners' ability to speak and to spell; noticing the parts of speech (word classes) of unfamiliar words from students' other domains of activity; documenting the various grammatical forms and pragmatic functions of prohibitions (utilizing negations) in the visual and auditory environment; exploring the social functions of indefinite and definite articles like "the," as it is used to build shared identities among family and friends around exclusively known local places and activities ("the spot [where we always used to meet]," "the park," "the DC," "the city"). A full description of the assignment, with assessment guidelines and sample student work, can be seen here.
On one level, the Linguistics 107 "Language in the World" observation assignment is an attempt at cultivating language awareness, that is, "an understanding of the human faculty of language and its role in thinking, learning and social life. It includes an awareness of power and control through language, and of the intricate relationships between language and culture" (van Lier, 1995, p. xi). Defined in this way, the assignment may not appear to depend upon the notion or observational techniques of "linguistic landscape." However, to the degree possible, I also wanted students to encourage students to rely upon their direct, in-the-moment observations of language as it was actually being used in their physical environments, rather than relying upon memories or preconceived ideas in order to generate 'examples' to submit for a grade. Accordingly, in several of the prompts, I asked students to document instances of written language, ideally with image or video. To the degree possible, I also wanted to encourage students to engage in conversations with each other, rather than performing for the instructor. I experimented with the online discussion platform Piazza for one semester before settling on Twitter, drawing inspiration from Llopis-García (2019) and other colleagues in second language teaching contexts who had innovated with social media as an interactive, media-rich social environment that could, in the right conditions, cultivate meaningful discourse with less friction than institutional learning management systems like Blackboard or Canvas. In this densely verbal-visual context, where written text, profile pictures, screen captures, memes, embedded videos, and other visuals interact to form their own screen-based semiotic landscape, it is not just the cultivation of language awareness but semiotic awareness---where "the ability to look, in Lanham's (1993) words, both 'at' and 'through' media is vital to decoding and designing multimodal meaning" (Nelson 2006, p. 59)---that becomes paramount in the language classrooms of today.
For me, imagining and designing projects like the "Language in the World" observation assignment through the paradigm of linguistic landscape has compelling implications for both teaching and research. This is precisely because linguistic landscape compels us to look both at language, as a material and embodied phenomenon in the world, and through language, to the worlds of meanings that it signifies and suggests, and to recognize that, in fact, one kind of meaning cannot exist without the other. In the apparent simplicity of the names of the businesses that surround us, and within the octagonal frame and bright red background of the stop sign, learners' and teachers' attention can pause to take in the totality of a language lesson-in-miniature, apprehending language not just within an image, but itself as image. The possibility for future language teachers to develop their metadiscursive awareness (that is, knowledge about language and other symbols in active use) by "picturing language" through images of everyday texts was the topic of a presentation I gave at the 2022 CALICO Convention, and it is a topic I am eager to investigate further.
Example 2: Linguistic landscape as 'soft' introduction to discourse analysis (LING 20)
As a first introduction to language studies and linguistics for a general student population, the undergraduate course The Nature of Language (Linguistics 20) offers a brief look into a broad range of subject areas in formal and applied linguistics, including the biological and historical foundations of language, phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics, discourse analysis, first and second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and topics in language and culture. The course is a lower division General Education course in the Social Sciences category (Area D) at SJSU, which makes it one option among many for undergraduates needing to fulfill this requirement. Beyond the course's mandate to introduce students to language as all of a rule-based system, a psychological phenomenon, and a social and cultural institution, it requires that students apply their new-found knowledge outside the classroom: the Course Learning Outcomes in the syllabus stipulate that students "use linguistic methods to collect and analyze data from local communities," and then "formulate original conclusions about contemporary language use and its variation in diverse regional, social, cultural, or ethnic communities."
In my one semester of teaching Linguistics 20, in Spring 2019, I assigned five short essays of 500-750 words, each focused around some sort of brief, experientially rich field project. For the class' readings of chapters on Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis from the course textbook (George Yule's The Study of Language), I thought a linguistic landscape project would be particularly apt, as it would ask students to interpret publicly visible or audible language in a familiar locale of their choosing---an act of 'denaturalization of the ordinary' that can be both a side effect and goal of analyzing real-world discourse. As may be seen in my full assignment description, grading rubric, and examples here, I was eager (and perhaps overly so) to have students apply notions such as context, deixis, speech acts, schemas, and scripts (all key terms from the Yule text) to their observations of the everyday language in use around them. In the assignment, as in the language of the material world, the possibilities for interpretation and analysis are myriad, and learning not just what to look but how to see it was a difficulty that students remarked on as they set out to write their papers.
However, just as Shohamy and Waksman remarked in their pathbreaking study on using linguistic landscape in educational contexts that "visible 'texts' need to be processed as 'tips of icebergs' to a deeper and more complex meaning" (2009, p. 328), Yule's observation that "pragmatics is the study of 'invisible' meaning, or how we recognize what is meant even when it is not actually said or written" (2017, p. 142) provided a metapragmatic focus of its own for this essay. In the phrasing of the prompt for the assignment, I tried to position students as 'insiders' with knowledge borne of their own life experience and cultural knowledge, with the task of revealing something of that insider knowledge for the benefit of their reader:
In this essay, your task is to [...] show how socially and culturally significant meanings can remain "invisible (unspoken, assumed, or suggested) in everyday life. [...] Pay attention to the ways language is used in public places to do things like: naming, informing, warning, guiding, inviting, prohibiting, advertising, protesting, claiming identity. Find some examples that you find particularly interesting---instances where someone without the 'necessary' knowledge, background, or expectations might misunderstand (or just plain miss!) the intended meaning.
In their essays, students wrote about a transgender visibility campaign on campus, noted the malleability of the term "something" in the ubiquitous public safety message "If you see something, say something," photographed evidence of San José trying to reassert its "cultural individuality and identity" (a student's words), documented evidence of Mexican heritage in the vicinity of campus, recorded corporate branding strategies of popular student hangouts, remarked on 'personalized' billboards advertising the city's professional ice hockey and soccer teams (the San Jose Sharks and Earthquakes), investigated a struggle between residents and the neighboring city of Mountain View over the development of a park into housing, and interviewed friends and family about the tension between graffiti and street art in their neighborhood.
Students' analyses were necessarily short, and they struggled with an assignment that I myself had not simplified and refined so as to make it easily digestible. Yet the diversity of social, cultural, and economic issues upon which they focused their attention, and the unique insights they brought to their analyses---made salient by their own interests and experiences---made for essays that, to me, demonstrated great potential. As other instructors might attest with respect to essay projects such as expert interviews and linguistic autobiographies, the overall paradigm of utilizing students' own insider knowledge in order to uncover "invisible meanings" in public spaces is a potent avenue into more formalized studies of language and discourse. In particular, the potential in classes such as SJSU's Linguistics 20 to involve students in larger-scale, collaborative citizen science research projects is compelling, especially considering the dense linguistic and cultural diversity of the city of San José and surrounding Santa Clara Valley.
References
Ben-Rafael, E., Shohamy, E., Hasan Amara, M., & Trumper-Hecht, N. (2006). Linguistic Landscape as Symbolic Construction of the Public Space: The Case of Israel. International Journal of Multilingualism, 3(1), 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790710608668383
Benson, P. (2021). Language Learning Environments: Spatial Perspectives on SLA. Multilingual Matters.
Bruzos, A. (2020). Linguistic landscape as an antidote to the commodification of study abroad language programs: A case study in the center of Madrid. In D. Malinowski, H. H. Maxim, & S. Dubreil (Eds.), Language teaching in the linguistic landscape: Mobilizing pedagogy in public space (pp. 253–292). Springer.
Cenoz, J., & Gorter, D. (2008). The linguistic landscape as an additional source of input in second language acquisition. IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 46(3), 267–287.
Chern, C. -l., & Dooley, K. (2014). Learning English by walking down the street. ELT Journal, 68(2), 113–123. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cct067
The Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A Transdisciplinary Framework for SLA in a Multilingual World. The Modern Language Journal, 100(S1), 19–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12301
Goodman, K. S., & Goodman, Yetta M. (1979). Learning to read is natural. In L. B. Resnick & P. A. Weaver (Eds.), Theory and practice of early reading (Vol. 1, pp. 137–154). Erlbaum.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. University Park Press.
Landry, R., & Bourhis, R. Y. (1997). Linguistic Landscape and Ethnolinguistic Vitality. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 16(1), 23–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X970161002
Llopis-Garcia, Reyes. 2019. Twitter and the City: The Linguistic Landscape of NYC through Social Media. Paper presented at MOBILLE International Conference, New York, NY, USA, February 21–22.
Nelson, M. E. (2006). Mode, meaning, and synaesthesia in multimedia L2 writing. Language Learning & Technology, 10(2), 56–76.
Neumann, M. M., Hood, M., Ford, R. M., & Neumann, D. L. (2012). The role of environmental print in emergent literacy. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 12(3), 231–258. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798411417080
Richardson, D. F. (2020). Floating traffic signs and the ambiguity of silence in the linguistic landscape. In D. Malinowski, H. H. Maxim, & S. Dubreil (Eds.), Language teaching in the linguistic landscape: Mobilizing pedagogy in public space (pp. 163–182). Springer.
Rowland, L. (2013). The pedagogical benefits of a linguistic landscape project in Japan. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 16(4), 494–505. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2012.708319
Sayer, P. (2010). Using the Linguistic Landscape as a Pedagogical Resource. ELT Journal, 64(2), 143–154. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccp051
Shohamy, E., & Waksman, S. (2009). Linguistic landscape as an ecological arena: Modalities, meanings, negotiations, education. In E. Shohamy & D. Gorter (Eds.), Linguistic landscape: Expanding the scenery (pp. 313–330). Routledge.
Solmaz, O., & Przymus, S. (Eds.). (2021). Linguistic landscapes in English Language Teaching: A pedagogical guidebook. http://llineltproject.com/
Szabó, T. P., & Dufva, H. (2020). University exchange students’ practices of learning Finnish: A language ecological approach to affordances in linguistic landscapes. In D. Malinowski, H. H. Maxim, & S. Dubreil (Eds.), Language teaching in the linguistic landscape: Mobilizing pedagogy in public space (pp. 93–117). Springer.
van Lier, L. (1995). Introducing language awareness. Penguin.
Yule, George. 2017. The study of language (6th edition). Cambridge University Press.