Abstract 2C

Saturday, July 8 3:40pm

Bringing Issues of Linguistic Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion into Focus through Linguistic Landscape Projects

Richard Hallett r-hallett@neiu.ed
Northeastern Illinois U, Chicago, USA

The rich point (Agar 1996) that led to the construction of a class linguistic landscape (LL) project began when a graduate student came into my Language Contact and Multilingualism class laughing. The student, who is biliterate in Mandarin and English, had noticed that the Chinese word for ‘welcome’, which had been upside-down for over year on the wall of the Student Welcome Center, had finally been switched to a right-side-up position. Another student, who was biliterate in Arabic and English, asked if anyone had noticed that the Arabic word for ‘bookstore’ in the window across from the welcome center was written backwards in Arabic. More examples of languages other than English (LOTE) in the LL of our campus, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), followed. It quickly became apparent to us that, at least on our campus, LOTE – particularly Spanish – primarily serve an emblematic function (Matras 2009, Matras and Robinson 2015) or a symbolic function (Bagna and Bellinzona 2022) rather than any other communicative or informative function.

Beginning with Krompák et al.’s (2022:3) claim that ‘while linguistic diversity in society is widely recognised, educational institutions still adhere to a monolingual habitus’, this presentation offers LL projects, from modified literacy walks (Chern & Dooley 2014) that the presenter has implemented in a variety of (socio)linguistic classes at his HSI to discourse analyses of websites (Kallen et al. 2020) to concomitantly illuminate and bring into focus issues of linguistic equity, diversity, and inclusion. By working with real LL data, the students see that ‘standardized’ American English has a privileged position in the US (Fairclough 1989, Falconer 2019, inter alia); these projects result in students’ realization that oftentimes US colleges and universities reinforce and perpetuate English language hegemony and monolingualism both on and off campus. The examples will come primarily from HSIs.

References

Agar, Michael. 1996. Language shock: understanding the culture of conversation. New York: William Morrow.

Bagna, Carla, and Martina Bellinzona. 2022. Italian linguistic schoolscape: Neo-plurilingualism in an age of migration. Linguistic landscapes and educational spaces, ed. by Edina Krompák, Víctor Fernández-Mallat, and Stephan Meyer. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 77-103.

Chern, Chiou-Ian, and Karen Dooley. 2014. Learning English by walking down the street. ELT Journal 68:2, 113-123. 

Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and power. New York: Longman.

Falconer, Heather M. 2019. Mentored writing at a Hispanic-Serving Institution: Improving student facility with scientific discourse. Bordered writers: Latinx identities and literacy practices at Hispanic-serving institutions, ed. by Isabel Baca, Yndalecio Isaac Hinojosa, and Susan Wolff Murphy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 213-230. 

Kallen, Jeffrey L., Esther Ní Dhonnacha, and Karen Wade. 2020. Online linguistic landscapes: Discourse, globalization, and enregisterment. Reterritorializing linguistic landscapes: Questioning boundaries and opening spaces, ed. by David Malinowski and Stefania Tufi. London: Bloomsbury, 96-116.

Krompák, Edina, Víctor Fernández-Mallat, and Stephan Meyer. 2022. The symbolic value of educationscapes – Expanding the intersections between linguistic landscape and education. Linguistic landscapes and educational spaces, ed. by Edina Krompák, Víctor Fernández-Mallat, and Stephan Meyer. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 1-27.

Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matras, Yaron, and Alex Robertson. 2015. Multilingualism in a post-industrial city: Policy and practice in Manchester. Current Issues in Language Planning 16:3, 296–314.