Linguistic landscape, critical language awareness and critical thinking: promoting learner agency in discourses about language

Linguistic Landscape Projects as English Teaching and Learning Resources: A Review

“…First of all, most of the studies were conducted in big cities of the countries where English is not the national or official language, such as China, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Oman, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Mexico, Spain, and Taiwan. In the linguistic landscape projects, the students were asked to choose the sites for the projects themselves and they have to explain the rationale, e.g., where there are abundant multilingual signs (Chestnut et al, 2013) in a typical area such as in Chinatown (Li & Marshall, 2017), anywhere as long as they can collect as many signs in English as possible in within a period of time e.g., a week (Rowland, 2013), within the capital city (e.g., Wangdi & Savski, 2022), in different cities of one country (Kweldju, 2021) or in different places of one city (Sabaté-Dalmau, 2022) through Google Map.…”

“…It"s important to highlight how these two researchers not only collected signs but also observed the daily language of the people, employed all the senses, made field notes and written reflections to understand how the linguistic landscape was informed by dynamic power-language relationship of the linguistic communities in the research site. Only three studies (Kweldju, 2021;Wangdi & Savski, 2022;Sabaté-Dalmau, 2022) made use of Google Map to locate the sites for collecting public signs, which enabled the students to go to distant cities in one country (Indonesia) or different streets in a city in a short time from wherever they were.…”

“…Most of the LL projects have been carried out at tertiary level, particularly for students with English major (Rowland, 2013;Chestnut, Lee & Schulte, 2013;Dumanig & David, 2019;Ariffin, De Mello, Husin, Anuarudin, & Omar, 2020;Barrs, 2020;Kweldju, 2021;Gorter, Cenoz & van der Worp, 2021;Sabaté-Dalmau, 2022;Wangdi & Savski, 2022). Even students at doctoral level have done the linguistic landscape projects to help them understand the rationale behind the dominance of English in commercial places like shopping streets or how the dynamic relationship between different communities and the powers attached to each is demonstrated in the linguistic landscape of a typical place like Chinatown (Li & Marshall, 2020).…”

“…More specifically, one of the aims is to have the English major university students examine how English has been used in the public signs, for example, identifying signs with inaccurate English (Rowland, 2013;Barrs, 2020;Ariffin et al, 2020), learning about the word-formation in English (Kweldju, 2021), increasing vocabularies and improving spelling (Dumanig & David, 2019), and learning the connotative meanings of English (Chestnut et al, 2013). Other aims are to investigate the EFL students" perception about the linguistic landscape projects (Chestnut et al, 2013;Dumanig & David, 2019) and develop students" critical thinking skills (Sayer, 2010;Rowland, 2013;Chestnut et al, 2013;Barrs, 2020) as well as critical language awareness (Wangdi & Savski, 2022) or metalinguistic awareness of the language varieties, including the Englishization phenomena in the public spaces (Sabaté-Dalmau, 2022). Meanwhile, for the young students at the primary level, the linguistic landscape project was expected to enable students to acquire basic literacy in English (Chern & Dooley, 2014) as well as to obtain some insights into the English signs outside the classroom from their perspectives as young EFL learners (Roos & Nicholas, 2020), and to raise the students" language awareness in their surroundings (Dagenais et al, 2009;Gorter et al, 2021).…”

“…Because of the rich insights that linguistic landscape has offered, researchers and teachers have also advocated its use for pedagogical purposes. Many have included linguistic landscape into their language or subjectcontent syllabuses (e.g., Rowland, 2013;Burwell & Lenters, 2015;Dumanig & David, 2019;Gorter, Cenoz & der Worp, 2021;Wangdi & Savski, 2022). In addition, there have been reviews on the history of linguistic landscape and multilingualism (Gorter, 2013) and its pedagogical advantages (e.g., Huebner, 2016).…”