An Educational Perspective on Community Languages in Linguistic Landscapes: Russian and Arabic

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter brings a fresh view on engagements with linguistic landscapes as learning environments and learning tools through the lenses of language and literacy studies and community-based language learning. We discuss the local linguistic landscape as naturally occurring and strategically constructed linguistic and semiotic representations of community languages and cultures. This approach highlights the link between learners, texts, social practices, and social environments, involving both dominant and minority community languages. The chapter focuses on the multilingual multimodal linguistic landscape involving two local immigrant community languages, Russian and Arabic, in Tucson, Arizona, a city in the southwest of the United States. It shows how the linguistic landscape, as a fusion of the social space and a social practice, stimulates language learning through everyday social experiences, and how these social experiences can integrate with the learning process. We discuss how engagements and interactions with both the linguistic landscape and the representatives of those language communities as sign makers and sign readers, reinforce negotiation of linguistic and cultural meaning of the linguistic landscapes. Thus, the local linguistic landscape as a learning tool and discursive space, inspires the exploration, production, and interpretation of public signs, offers a learning context, and stimulates language and cultural learning in naturally occurring contexts.