Language matters
Schoolscapes and multilingual awareness in international schools Susan Stewart reports, with Jackie Jia Lou and Jean-Marc Dewaele
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our offering of 23 home languages as part of the curriculum. A few months and many conversations later, we embarked on a research project together, in collaboration with Jackie’s Birkbeck colleague, Dr Jean-Marc Dewaele. Our project was generously supported by the BAAL (British Association of Applied Linguistics) Applying Linguistics Fund, specifically designed to support ‘innovative activities which link research and application/public engagement’. Entitled Increasing the visibility of linguistic diversity in an international school, our project included the Grades 3 and 4 children as co-researchers, with half of each grade serving as a control group. The (non-control group) children Summer |
Winter
In January 2018 I was fortunate to meet Dr Jackie Jia Lou, a Birkbeck College (University of London) Sociolinguistics lecturer with an interest in ‘linguistic landscape’. The term ‘linguistic landscape’ can be understood as the visual display of languages in a geographic area; the associated term ‘schoolscape’ refers to the linguistic landscape of a school. Following an informal visit by Jackie to my school, The International School of London (ISL), I began to develop an understanding of what ‘linguistic landscape’ is and how this might be relevant within the context of international schools. For Jackie, this was her first visit to an international school with a linguistically diverse student population and
| 2020
