Project Localising English in Lleida (UdL)
Sociolinguistics Course: English Language in Context (ELiC)
Instructor: Maria Sabaté-Dalmau (maria.sabate@udl.cat)
This is a collective university project on Linguistic Landscapes (henceforth LL) involving the uses and social meanings of English in Lleida City. It was first created in 2018/2019 by 2nd-year students of English Studies at the University of Lleida (Catalonia) enrolled in the course "English Language in Context".The goal of this project is to observe, document, present and critically analyse the uses and social meanings of different public local and global language resources in multimodal signs located in Lleida City, over eight weeks. LL is used as an innovative pedagogical tool to learn how to do research in sociolinguistics and to raise awareness and foster self-reflection abilities about the role of multilingualism in socioeconomic transformations and in different types of mobilities and migrations, linked to globalisation processes in the era of transnationalism, in the students' immediate social context. This includes the exploration of the interplays between the two "local" languages of the city (Spanish, the majority nation-state language of Spain; and Catalan, a historically minoritised code spoken in the North East) and "global" languages, including economically powerful lingua francas like English or French as well as silenced codes like Arabic or Urdu. In line with socially-engaged citizen sociolinguistics, this blog and the associated collective Googlemap (below) aim to generate and share and transfer knowledge through 2.0 webs of participation.
Localising English in Lleida
Linguistic landscaping as a pedagogical tool
Linguistic Landscape originally referred to “the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings” (Landry and Bourhis, 1997: 25). Linguistic landscaping (LL) investigates the dynamic presence and degrees of visibility or silencing of local and global “languages” in public spaces, and it tries to understand what these ever-changing configurations of street languages tells us about wider social, economic, political and identity issues. Linguistic resources fulfil not only informational but also symbolic functions as a markers of power relationships between languages and their communities of use. In this sense, investigating the production and distribution of linguistic inscriptions in public space may allow us to understand social transformations such as gentrification, migration, touristification or elitisation which involve relationships, tensions, resistance and competitions among those inhabiting that space. Although there is an increasing number of publications in the area of LL, this methodology has little presence in academic curricula (with noticeable exceptions; see Martín-Rojo and Molina, 2012; Prego-Vázquez & Zas Varela, 2018). Multilingualism in the public space might go unnoticed by university students who, following monolingual conceptions of languages as bounded codes linked to a particular "territory" or "native community" are either too familiar with their environment or have not had the chance to develop awareness of, and critically reflect on, linguistic diversity that transcends geographic borders and 'native-speaker' conceptions in their everyday life -particularly, on the Englishisation processes in their immediate surrounding (i.e. their physical and social spaces).With the experience of a previous experimental innovative pedagogical project piloted during the academic year 2017-2018, and inspired by the projects (1) “Multilingual Lausanne” (Multilingual Lausanne) at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), led by instructor Maria Rosa Garrido-Sardà, and by (2) "Lenguas pa la citi" (Madrid Multilingüe) at Autonomous University of Madrid, led by Luisa Martín-Rojo, who very kindly and patiently shared and helped us in this endavour, we have set up the project "Localising English in Lleida" with three main objectives.
- Raise students' awareness about local and global languages in contact in Lleida and develop critical reflection upon the roles and social meanings that this contextualised linguistic diversity has in connection to contemporary mobilities in Catalonia (e.g. migration, international study, global economy, tourism, supranational language policy-making), with a focus on English as a global language.
- Teach them how to manage qualitative research tools in Applied Linguistics and, specifically, how to do research in sociolinguistics: getting acquainted with the theoretical underpinnings of this approach to multilingual phenomena, formulating a research question, collecting data through observation (including picture-taking, data-managing/storing, data-selection and data plotting via ICT), critically analysing the roles and social meanings of multimodal/multilingual individual messages, and presenting their own reflective perspectives on what these tell us about socioeconomic and cultural processes and transformations, by writing a research report for the wider public (i.e. the blog posts here) and by presenting findings and generated knowledge in public oral presentations.
- Contribute to the Observatori del discurs of the EDiSo association (Studies of Discourse and Society), which is committed to educating socially-engaged, participative/agentive university students through collective LL projects, in Madrid, Santiago de Compostela and Barcelona, to name but a few. This platform shares LL data gathered by university students in different countries through project blogs, its own Facebook page, on the Urban Voices app (Urban Voices) and thesis repositories.
Our project: Aims, development plan and objectives
Our project is planned as follows. After an introduction to the basics of sociolinguistics and qualitative research methods, students are first asked to observe, locate and photograph multimodal signs involving English at the University of Lleida (including graffiti, institutional notices, toilet signs, and so on), as a way to introduce them to LL practice, with the instructor's guidance. Over the course of eight weeks, they are then asked to "do" landscaping in groups of three, in public spaces in the 14 neighbourhoods in Lleida. They are free to explore the different neighbourhoods assigned to them without pre-defined public emplacements or topics given to them. On the basis of their observations, and of what they had learnt from the LLs posted on the previous (2017-2018) edition, students select a corpus of one LL and post them on our collective Google Map (above) with a classification taken from the aforementioned "Multilingual Lausanne" and "Madrid Multilingüe" projects. The categories for LL data classification/categorisation include (along with minimum two interactive pictures/captions):
Feedback is given at this stage concerning the thematic cohesion and, particularly, uses and social meanings of the collective corpus, organised along the following areas: (1) local and global historicisation of the presence and use of the languages in town; (2) their economic weight or value ("profitability"), (3) identity-related matters, (4) their prestige and statuses of languages. The fieldwork to be conducted for data gathering is based on a multisited ethnographic approach (Hannerz, 2003) whereby they are asked to visit the LLs at least three times at different times of the day and to take detailed fieldnotes on the -languages heard from- people involved/engaged in it (e.g. clients in a shop; students in a language center, and so on). The guiding questions that I gave students for analysis were the following:
·
What languages practices involving English are gaining
preeminence/visibility in town? Since when? In what (municipal, commercial,
educational) sites?
·
To what extent, and how, do these local and global
languages interplay and merge with each other? Are there ‘language fusions’
more prestigious than others?
·
Which languages are most invisibilized (even hidden),
and why? What is the ‘value’ attributed to them?
·
Which non-standard LLs defy established standard norms
and why? And what can these
tell us about the individual(s)/institution(s) that are involved in them?
·
And, in short, ‘What ‘real’ multilingualism involving English have you
encountered in your everyday walks around the city, and what does this tell us
about our society?’
The overall aim, in the collective discussion and reflective sessions (in oral presentations) follows a citizen sociolinguistics
rationale, which encourages participatory
research by non-language specialists and includes students as key social agents in the generation and dissemination of knowledge concerning languages in society, with “the potential to
provide research experience, stimulate curiosity, further research,
public understanding of science and increased (socio)linguistic
awareness and knowledge” (Svendsen, 2018: 140).
As a whole, these questions aim to investigate the power dynamics and ideologies (including silencing of migrant languages, taken-for-grantedness of the superiority of English, etc.) underlying the relations between social groups/individuals through linguistic diversity representations in the urban space. Thus, they aim to make student aware of hierarchical relationships between languages in contact, the relationship between a specific language and informational or symbolic functions, and the conditions of use under local/global language policies and sociolinguistic orders and normativities.
A very brief explanation of the overall project is presented here: Innovacions docents a la Facultat de Lletres de la UdL
fluxadper_ba1992 Jamie Smith
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