‘Localizing English in town’: a linguistic landscape project for a Critical Linguistics Education on multilingualism

ABSTRACT

This article presents the outcomes of a 2-year pilot study of a teaching innovation project in an English-medium instruction course on sociolinguistics, in a languages degree at a Catalan university. Following the tenets of Critical Linguistics Education, our proposal aimed at promoting the students’ development of metalinguistic awareness of linguistic diversity; particularly, of Englishization phenomena in their socialization spaces. Firstly, we detail the project, based on the students’ interpretive analysis of the social meanings of a series of Linguistic Landscapes involving local and global languages that they gathered ethnographically. This required the use of two technologies of citizenship participation, employed as Foreign Language learning/teaching instruments: A geolocating map and a 2.0 web. We then analyze the students’ productions, and their marks, course ratings and project-assessment reports. We show that the required disciplinary content and advanced English level were attained. Students became knowledge generators of sociolinguistics phenomena and developed an intercultural, plurilingual competence in ‘localized Englishes’. We conclude that the use of Linguistic Landscaping is an effective means to develop the multilingual literacy, technoliteracy and learning-to-learn competences required by the European Council. This contributes to the design of pedagogical strategies fostering the students’ commitment to an ethics of respect towards multilingualism.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Linguistics Education
• linguistic landscaping
• metalinguistic awareness
• intercultural plurilingual English competence
• citizenship participation technologies

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the students in our class for their participation and support in this project.

Data availability statement

The data that supports the findings are available upon request from the corresponding author. They are not publicly available because they contain confidential information compromising the informants’ anonymity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following the criteria of the ethics committee of the university where this study was conducted, we omit the names of the city, the university, the Faculty, the languages degree and the course addressed here that could compromise the informants’ anonymity, for data protection and confidentiality reasons. In the same line, students’ productions are also anonymized.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under Grant PID2019-104333GB-I00; and the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants AGAUR 2017 SGR 1522.

Notes on contributors

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau

Maria Sabaté-Dalmau (MA in Linguistic Anthropology, University of Toronto; MA and PhD in English Philology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) is Associate professor at the University of Lleida, where she conducts critical sociolinguistic ethnographic research on mobility, multilingualism and transnational linguistic identities. She is Deputy Head of the Catalan Sociolinguistics Society and member of the commissions of the international Asociación de Estudios sobre Discurso y Sociedad. She is a part of the Editorial Board of Treballs de Sociolingüística Catalana and Associate Editor of International Journal of the Sociology of Language. Her work includes Migrant Communication Spaces: Regimentation and Resistance (Multilingual Matters, 2014).