AbstractAs the assemblage of visible, audible, and otherwise textualized languages of public space, the linguistic landscape forms a rich context for understanding how material and environmental affordances affect language learning, and how language teachers can bring their L2 curricula to life. Whether it is within the four walls of a school, in a nearby neighborhood, or in virtual telecollaborative environments, the chapters of this volume illustrate how such diverse configurations of space lend themselves to language and literacy learning, while also contributing to learners’ critical cultural and historical awareness. Before inviting the reader to the volume’s nine chapters, this introduction outlines the history and significance of “space” in language teaching and learning research, a topic of significant interest and innovation in L2 education today. It then offers a framework for the spatialization of language teaching, that is, a pedagogy that is linguistically and culturally complex, geographically situated, historically informed, dialogically realized, and socially engaged. Whether one endeavors to teach in a traditional classroom, or immersed in the sights and sounds of outdoor spaces, or even from one's desktop at home, language teaching with the linguistic landscape is evaluated for its potential to extend the human, symbolic, and critical dimensions of L2 learning.

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An historically, spatially and methodologically rich sub-field of sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscapes (LL) is a rapidly evolving area of research and study. With contributions by an international team of experts from the USA, Europe, the UK, South Africa, Israel, Hong Kong and Colombia, this volume is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary account of the most recent theoretical and empirical developments in this area. It covers both the conceptual tools and methodologies used to define and question, and case studies of real-world phenomena to showcase Linguistic Landscapes methods in action.

Our article presents the case of ePortfolio use for university-level language learners in foreign, second, and heritage (L2) language classes. It outlines the multi-year initiative of a language center in a private university in the Northeastern U.S. to introduce and support the use of ePortfolios in language classes across its campus. The article takes the form of a narrative in two parts, and in two voices. First, the authors outline the rationale, stages of planning, faculty training initiatives, and technical considerations from the vantage point of the language center’s ePortfolio initiative. The second narrative portrays how this ePortfolio initiative took shape in one semester of an Advanced German course. There, the instructor experimented with ePortfolios to showcase students’ language skills and intercultural achievements, while cultivating their digital literacy. We argue that the potential for students to take ownership over their ePortfolios as tools for deeper academic and personal development resides significantly with their instructor’s pedagogical assumptions and approaches. Further, we suggest that language learners’ sustained and deeper use of ePortfolios can be best supported not by a single classroom instructor acting alone, but through coordinated pedagogical, administrative, and technological support across the institution.

Building upon paradigms of language and languaging practices as local phenomena (Canagarajah, 2013; Pennycook, 2010, Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes, 2013), this paper narrates a teacher’s experience in an undergraduate seminar in applied language studies as an exploration in transdisciplinarity-as-localization. Taught by the author in 2012-2013, the seminar was intended as an introduction to the politics of societal multilingualism as visible in the linguistic landscape of public texts. As such, it relied upon its own geographic and institutional locality, as well as the diverse conceptual moorings and methodologies of linguistic landscape research (e.g., Blommaert, 2013; Shohamy & Gorter, 2009; Trumper-Hecht, 2010) in order to lead students in interpreting the significance of East Asian languages in the San Francisco Bay Area. However, as the paper endeavors to show, the course’s own curriculum—and with it, the locus of teacherly authority—was forced to de-localize as the implementation of curricular ideals in practice revealed heterogeneous and expansive orders of meaning.

In the context of increasing interest in the linguistic landscape as a site of language and literacy learning, this paper outlines a conceptual framework for joining recent innovations in LL theory and methodology with pedagogical practice in second and foreign language education. After a review of current approaches to teaching the linguistic forms, cultural messages, and political actions realized in the linguistic landscape, a spatialized perspective based upon the principle of thirdness is proposed as a way for learners to explore, contrast, and reflect upon multiple meanings in the LL. Specifically, the paper adapts methodological innovations in Trumper-Hecht (2010) and other recent research by reinterpreting Henri Lefebvre’s triadic paradigm of conceived, perceived, and lived spaces for the language classroom, such that teachers and learners can design nuanced, multilayered investigations of discourses in place. As qualitative methods cast new light on questions of subjectivity, materiality, and change in the linguistic landscape, it is argued, linguistic landscape research offers valuable tools for pedagogical application, even as language learners open up new interpretive spaces for research.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been seen as offering a way to sensitize language learners to heteroglossia in all its forms: varieties of linguistic codes and styles, varieties of opinions and ideological points of view, diversity of semiotic meaning-making modalities-all of which are difficult to instantiate through one single teacher in a classroom. Thus, CMC has been touted as an ideal pedagogic solution to an age-old problem: How to put foreign language learners in dialogue with genuine native speakers to experience this heteroglossia? CMC, however, does not always deliver what it promises. Drawing upon an ethnographic analysis of in-classroom observations, online discourse, and learner reflections, this chapter attempts to conceptualize and describe a manner of online language that is neither the multivoicedness that Bakhtin called heteroglossia nor the authoritative discourse he presented as its antithesis, but echoings and mirrorings that turn learners back on themselves.

While much scholarship on the multisensory and transmodal phenomenon of synaesthesia seeks to uncover its psychophysiological and neurological bases, recent research in multimodal literacy and language acquisition addresses it largely in terms of agentive processes of meaning-making and design. This paper takes as its starting point the latter’s concern with socially situated learning, but examines data from a university-based, distance French learning project in order to suggest that such research may need to look further. Content and narrative analyses of students’ reflective drawings illustrate their awareness of the complexities of learning and expression in hypermediated environments, where geographic and virtual spaces, mediated and interpersonal relations and embodied and on-screen actions converge – all seeming contradictions that may, when viewed together, offer a new vantage point on the nature of synaesthesia, from the outside.

AbstractTechnology and culture: perhaps few words are more commonly uttered when making reference to the conditions under which language learning and teaching today take place.