Edina Krompák, Victor Fernández-Mallat, Stephen Meyer (Eds.) (2022) : Linguistic landscapes and educational spaces [book review]

Abstract

This book belongs to the series by Multilingual Matters on ‘New Perspectives on Language and Education’, and it is one of my recent favourites. The topic of linguistic landscape and educational space has caught the attention of scholars in the last decade or so, and in my opinion, it is generating some very useful research that is accessible to teachers. It can help them become aware of their own schoolscape, and the messages that the schoolscape explicitly and implicitly gives. This book can also inspire them to adopt some very motivating tools in teaching. The linguistic landscape in general is documented, described and analysed in a variety of ways. The most well-known examples are the analyses of commercial and public signs that tell a story about the multilingualism in many cities around the world, while bringing to the fore examples of translanguaging, multimodality and linguistic ideology (e.g. Putz & Mundt, 2018). Other research focuses on graffiti, stickers, menus, brand names, banners, and more rarely on street names and house names (e.g. Camilleri Grima, 2020). Similarly, the schoolscape is a semiotic category, and it can reveal much about the symbolic value of language use in education. For instance, the article by Krompák, Camilleri Grima & Farrugia (2020) presents a comparative analysis of parts of the schoolscape in two primary schools, one in Malta and one in Switzerland. As a result of this analysis, a number of lessons are teased out for teacher education, such as, ways of acknowledging the linguistic and cultural diversity of the learners, the representation on the walls of language and of cross-curricular relations between subjects. [excerpt]