Language Teaching in the Linguistic Landscape

Book excerpt: 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.