Word on the street: Investigating linguistic landscapes with urban Canadian youth

Abstract

This article reports on a case study inspired by the concept of “linguistic landscapes.” We collaborated with a group of Humanities teachers to design and implement the “Word on the Street” project, in which Grade 10 students took on the role of researchers to explore the linguistic, visual and spatial texts of their neighbourhood. We show how the concept of linguistic landscapes fits especially well with a pedagogy of multiliteracies by encouraging the critical study of multimodality and linguistic diversity in context. We then describe the design and implementation of the project, which combined visual analysis with the production of place-based documentaries. Reading two of the documentaries, we illustrate ways that students used the project to identify and investigate the gap between how their community is represented, and how they experience it in their daily lives. In the end, we argue that linguistic landscape analysis provides a unique pedagogical tool for recognizing the complexity of meaning-making in urban landscapes, one with the potential to confront the inequities that shape the lives of many youth living in contemporary global cities.