The Linguistic Landscape: Enhancing Multiliteracies through Decoding Signs in Public Spaces

The Linguistic Landscape (LL) is a relatively new field which draws from several disciplines such as applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and cultural geography. According to Landry and Bourhis (1997),"the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration" (p. 25). More recently, the type of signs that can be found in the public space has broadened to include the language on T-shirts, stamp machines, football banners, postcards, menus, products, tattoos, and graffiti. This chapter describes one example of how LL has been integrated in the Virtual Exchanges (VE) organised between fourth-year undergraduate students of English at Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, Spain, and second-year undergraduate students of Spanish at Columbia University in New York, USA. This is followed by a discussion of the benefits and potential drawbacks of integrating the LL into the foreign language classroom. [For the complete volume, see ED612143.]