University Exchange Students’ Practices of Learning Finnish: A Language Ecological Approach to Affordances in Linguistic Landscapes

Abstract

In linguistic landscape (LL) studies, various projects have demonstrated how language learners benefit from tasks that involve the documentation and interpretation of the LL. In this chapter we contribute to research on LL-based language learning, investigating how Finnish as a second language learner exchange students turned the local LL into affordances during their time abroad in Finland.While language awareness and its relation to learning and teaching have been extensively discussed, it has often been regarded as a property of an individual consciousness: a faculty or a tendency of a particular person to perceive, notice and reflect upon the linguistic features present in their environments. In contrast, we argue for an approach that contests the person vs. environment dualism and frames language awareness in terms of relational processes. Using awareness raising tasks in second language pedagogy may help learners not only to notice what is useful in their environments, but at the same time invites them to reflect on how they can make use of such resources.Based on the analysis of our corpus we argue that the students explored the role of the LL in their learning and thus, implicitly, also displayed elements of an ecological model of distributed cognition which we discuss in detail. We believe that taking notice of the dimensions of language learning ecology helps teachers in designing LL-based tasks in a way that they can consider and include all relevant elements of a distributed cognitive ecosystem when planning and implementing their courses.

Kielimaisemat kielikoulutuspolitiikan kohteena ja tekijänä kieliparikouluissa

“…miten etäalustalla toimitaan eri tavalla kuin luokkahuoneessa), jolloin heidän toimijuutensa, eli kyky toimia ja vaikuttaa eri tilanteissa kasvaa. Osana oppimista he havaitsevat ja tietoisesti hyödyntävät ympäristön semioottisia resursseja, kuten ympäristössä ilmenevää kieltä (Szabó & Dufva 2021). Oppimisympäristössä esiintyvä kieli on usein multimodaalista, merkitykset välittyvät usein esimerkiksi tekstin ja kuvan yhdistelmänä: KUVA 1.…”

Muuttuva ja moninainen kielenoppiminen

“…in the wild -tutkimus (Hellermann ym. 2019), kielimaisematutkimus (Szabó & Dufva 2020) ja teknologisiin oppimisympäristöihin kohdistuva tutkimus (Nielson 2022) ovat esimerkkejä koulun ulkopuolisten kielenoppimistilojen tutkimuksesta. Myös työpaikkojen rooli kielenoppimisen tiloina on korostunut erityisesti lisääntyvän maahanmuuton ja sen myötä monikielistyvän työelämän myötä (esim.…”

Linguistic ecology and multilingual education

“…Across a range of country contexts, contributing authors brought us into multilingual classrooms and educational settings to uncover underlying ideologies and spotlight teacher-student interactions. Researchers have also begun to look beyond the immediate microsystem to an "ecology of learning" in linguistic landscapes beyond the classroom, or "learning-in-thewild, " to understand better the role of the broader environment in language learning (Szabó & Dufva, 2020).…”