3 Landscape Design for Language Revitalisation: Linguistic Landscape in and beyond a Māori Immersion Early Childhood Centre

A Panorama of Linguistic Landscape Studies

“…Visitors may assume they have arrived in a bilingual country, but the authors see this use of Māori as tokenistic, exoticizing and merely decorative. In contrast, Harris et al (2022) found a high presence of the Māori language inside a Māori immersion early childhood center. Most of the signs were produced by the teachers and used for education purposes.…”

“…For them, it was a complementary source, next to still photography, to facilitate capturing texts on moving objects such as buses and digital screens. Harris et al (2022) video recorded their schoolscape data in a Māori early childhood center twice; first, at the height of an adult and, second, at the height of a child. Their method of video recording was able to demonstrate the differences in perspective between the adult caretakers and the children.…”

“…The same difference in perception evidently applies also to first-time visitors versus regular passersby or between people with different socioeconomic backgrounds or other relevant demographic characteristics. An important advantage of video recording as used by Harris et al (2022) is that it allows the sequence of signs following a specific route along the walls of an educational center to be analyzed from two perspectives. This study was a case of non-participatory video recording, although it took the perspective of the participants in the environment into consideration.…”

Kaiako perspectives on professional learning and development in structured literacy in Māori-medium settings: A case study

“…Placement, size or colour of displays may increase the salience and importance of languages (Huebner, 2006). In a study exploring te reo Māori in classrooms, Harris (2016) reports that the linguistic landscape creates an authentic environment for children to use te reo Māori and contributes to a normalizing of the use of te reo Māori within the classroom. The linguistic landscape is relevant to Māori-immersion classrooms as the physical space given to te reo Māori can support the attitudes students hold towards learning te reo Māori.…”