What’s in a house name? Student-teachers’ dialogic encounters with multilingual texts in the environment

Abstract

This article reports a project that I carried out with prospective Maltese language teachers in order to give them the opportunity to examine their linguistic landscape (LL), to develop an awareness and a curiosity about how languages are used in house names, and to reflect on their own learning. The student-teachers adopted visual ethnography to create a corpus of house names collected from different towns in Malta. They also conducted brief interviews with some of the house owners, kept a reflective journal and adopted a dialogic pedagogy. The student-teachers reflected on their own language knowledge, attitudes, and skills as they examined the meaning of house names. The final part of the project involved the creation of metalinguistic awareness tasks for use in the classroom. As evidenced by extracts from the participants’ reflective journals this project yielded useful information about the advantages of observing and analysing language use in the community. The study shows that through metalinguistic activities teachers and learners are able to reflect upon, and interpret some of the ways in which the LL reflects people’s creative use of language.

Keywords:

• Linguistic landscape
• house names
• Malta
• teacher education
• dialogic pedagogy

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antoinette Camilleri Grima

Antoinette Camilleri Grima is full Professor of Applied Iinguistics at the Department of Languages and Humanities of the Faculty of Education, University of Malta. She has written, co-authored and co-edited several books on language education and bilingual education, and she has published in the areas of learner autonomy, sociolinguistics and Maltese language teaching. She has also produced two sets of courses for radio to teach Maltese as a Foreign Language. She has co-ordinated international workshops on language education at the European Centre for Modern Languages of the Council of Europe, and she has worked as language administrator at the Council of Ministers of the European Union.