What’s in a house name? Student-teachers’ dialogic encounters with multilingual texts in the environment

Abstract

This article reports a project that I carried out with prospective Maltese language teachers in order to give them the opportunity to examine their linguistic landscape (LL), to develop an awareness and a curiosity about how languages are used in house names, and to reflect on their own learning. The student-teachers adopted visual ethnography to create a corpus of house names collected from different towns in Malta. They also conducted brief interviews with some of the house owners, kept a reflective journal and adopted a dialogic pedagogy. The student- teachers reflected on their own language knowledge, attitudes, and skills as they examined the meaning of house names. The final part of the project involved the creation of metalinguistic awareness tasks for use in the classroom. As evidenced by extracts from the participants’ reflective journals this project yielded useful information about the advantages of observing and analysing language use in the community. The study shows that through metalinguistic activities teachers and learners are able to reflect upon, and interpret some of the ways in which the LL reflects people’s creative use of language.