This volume focuses on how landscape is represented in language and thought and what this reveals about the relationships of people to place and to land. -- Back cover.

This book builds upon the growing field of Linguistic Landscape in order to demonstrate the power of a spatialized approach to language, culture, and literacy education as it opens classrooms and cultivates new competencies. The chapters develop major themes, including re-imagining language curricula, language classrooms, and schoolscapes in dialogue with the heteroglossic discourses of the local; developing L2 learners’ symbolic, translingual competencies through engagement with situated, multimodal texts; fostering critical social awareness through language study in the linguistic landscape; expanding opportunities for situated L2 reading and writing; and cultivating language students’ capacities for engaged scholarship and research in out-of-class contexts. By exploring the pedagogical possibilities of place-based approaches to literacy development, this volume contributes to the reimagining of language education through the linguistic landscape.

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes. Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors--Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin--and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

This book focuses on linguistic landscapes in present-day urban settings. In a wide-ranging collection of studies of major world cities, the authors investigate both the forces that shape linguistic landscape and the impact of the linguistic landscape on the wider social and cultural reality. Not only does the book offer a wealth of case studies and comparisons to complement existing publications on linguistic landscape, but the editors aim to investigate the nature of a field of study which is characterised by its interest in ‘ordered disorder’. The editors aspire to delve into linguistic landscape beyond its appearance as a jungle of jumbled and irregular items by focusing on the variations in linguistic landscape configurations and recognising that it is but one more field of the shaping of social reality under diverse, uncoordinated and possibly incongruent structuration principles.

Linguistic Landscape in the Spanish-speaking World is the first book dedicated to languages in the urban space of the Spanish-speaking world filling a gap in the extensive research that highlights the richness and complexity of Spanish Linguistic Landscapes. This book provides scholars with an instrument to access a variety of studies in the field within a monolingual or multilingual setting from a theoretical, sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective. The works contained in this volume aim to answer questions such as, how the linguistic landscape of certain territories includes new discourses that, ultimately, contribute to a fairer society; how the linguistic landscape of minority or low-income communities can enforce changes on language policy and who determines advertising planning; how these decisions are made and how these decisions affect vendors, customers, and the general public alike. All in all, this collective volume uncovers the voices of minority groups within the communities under study.

This book provides a forum for theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to research on language(s), multimodality and public space, which will advance new ways of understanding the sociocultural, ideological and historical role of communication practices and experienced lives in a globalised world. Linguistic Landscape is viewed as a metaphor and expanded to include a wide variety of discursive modalities: imagery, non-verbal communication, silence, tactile and aural communication, graffiti, smell, etc. The chapters in this book cover a range of geographical locations, and capture the history, motives, uses, causes, ideologies, communication practices and conflicts of diverse forms of languages as they may be observed in public spaces of the physical environment. The book is anchored in a variety of theories, methodologies and frameworks, from economics, politics and sociology to linguistics and applied linguistics, literacy and education, cultural geography and human rights.

Providing an innovative approach to the written displays of minority languages in public space this volume explores minority language situations through the lens of linguistic landscape research. Based on very tangible data it explores the 'same old issues' of language contact and language conflict in new ways.