Appropriating to the Schoolscape: A Study of Reference of Linguistic Landscape in Dyad Text Construction

Abstract

Linguistic landscaping (LL) has been argued as an intentional activity undertaken by actors in a specific sociocultural and political context for multitudes of purposes such as planning (Singh, 2002). This proposition implies that in multilingual contexts, LL can take the form of a top-down intervention towards manipulating languages in a space and bottom-up individual’s idiosyncratic use of languages towards particular positions and function(s). Schools are vulnerable to both and hence schoolscape offer glimpses of both the forms: the signs and notices placed in the school and pertaining to the school represent the top-down ideologies and language policy in action while the individual actors’ language(s) use and multimodal representations in the school space contribute towards their idiosyncratic purposes. In the second case, purposes could include language learning/language awareness/creative multilingual and multimodal expression and affirming/resisting/remaking identities. Hence any investigations of the schoolscape if restricted to a study of visible and long-term written signs in a specific sociolinguistic and cultural context restricts three other aspects: a) construes the etic view of LL without considering the existence of an intentionality of an emic response; b) strictures the presence of other non-represented languages in the school space; c) misrepresents and masks the deep multilingualism in the school and; d) annihilates the learners’ efforts and struggles to appropriate ones language capability to ones needs (even if it means to the schoolscape). We believe that investigating the fourth aspect would make visible the other three as well. Therefore this study examines how learners use the LL as they appropriate their language capabilities to create a text to one language in their school space namely English. 18 pairs of class 8 learners in a government-run Zillah Parishad High School co-constructed a text in English. Their multilingual talk, ‘scribblings’ based on specific LL and the text that evolved out of the first two formed the data. In this paper we will examine the first two forms of the data. The findings will have implications for teacher education especially in raising teacher awareness to deep multilingualism, learner agency and language ideologies behind language planning and management.