Learning Schoolscapes in a Minority Setting

Abstract

. In my paper, I present a qualitative approach to the linguistic landscape of Hungarian schools in Sepsiszentgyörgy/Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania . These landscapes are called schoolscapes as they represent the material environment where texts and images "constitute, reproduce and transform language ideologies" (Brown 2012: 282) . These manifestations reveal a lot about language learning and teaching in a formal educational environment . Beyond the simple representations of languages in education, we may trace more or less hidden curriculum details of foreign-and secondlanguage teaching (English/German, Romanian) in a Hungarian-Romanian dominant bilingual setting . My aim is to describe the visual manifestations of the differences and similarities between the languages taught to minority children and the mutual efforts of teachers and students to meet the basic challenges of learning and teaching these languages .

Translanguaging and Linguistic Landscapes: A Study of Manitoban Schoolscapes

“…A common finding in the aforementioned studies was that the minority language was underrepresented even in territories where it was widely spoken by the population. Particularly, it is felt that when a minority language is present in a public space it is symbolic of that language's status in society (Biró, 2016).…”

“…It is clear that these images shed light on greater issues related to language and language use. Although linguistic landscape researchers have generally focused on the analysis of public spaces, a new sub-division of researchers have started to look at semi-public spaces as well, such as schools (Amara, 2018;Biró, 2016;Brown, 2012;Dressler, 2015;Gorter, 2018). These studies on scholastic linguistic landscapes are known as schoolscapes, a term coined by Brown (2012).…”

“…Moreover, Brown (2012) studied the linguistic landscape of three Võro-language elementary schools in Estonia in order to uncover the language ideologies that were symbolically present in the schoolscape. More recent studies have also looked at language ideologies and the hidden curriculum in schoolscapes but have employed a 'tourist guide technique' wherein teachers or principals are interviewed while the researcher takes pictures of the schoolscape (Amara, 2018;Biró, 2016;Przymus & Kohler, 2018;Szabó, 2015). These more recent studies generally analyze more than one school and tend to use both elementary and secondary schools as research sites.…”

Palestinian schoolscapes in Israel

“…Several studies focus on schoolscapes in the context of language ideologies. Biro (2016), for instance, describes the visual manifestations of the linguistic landscape of Hungarian schools in Romania, revealing differences and similarities between the languages taught to minority children. The article also seeks to investigate the mutual efforts of the teachers and students to deal with the basic challenges of teaching and learning languages.…”

More Than a Facebook Share: Exploring Virtual Linguistic Landscape

“…They mainly focus on how the linguistic landscape can elucidate power relationships between majority and minority groups of speakers (Gorter-Cenoz 2017: 238). Starting from "the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs and public signs on governmental buildings" originally listed by Landry-Bourhis (1997) in their pioneer article, linguistic landscape studies arrived at a point where studies have already included as their interest of investigation a wide range of phenomena from graffiti (Pennycook 2010) to the language of tourist postcards (Jaworski 2010) or signs of classroom walls (Laihonen-Tódor 2017, Laihonen-Szabó 2017, Biró 2016; even sounds, music, and smells are incorporated nowadays. Finally, studies have come to analyse the phenomenon of the cyberspace (e.g.…”