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Schoolscapes and multilingual awareness in international schools
Susan Stewart reports, with Jackie Jia Lou and Jean-Marc Dewaele
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 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
documented the schoolscape, each being given an iPad for 20 minutes with the instruction to ‘take photos of the languages you see around the school’. They then took part in creative workshops, designing posters in a language of their choice which were later framed and displayed in a location of their choice around the school. Questionnaire surveys were administered to all children, control group included, at three stages of the project to examine the impact of these participatory activities on students’ multilingual awareness; this included questions on attitudes towards multilingualism as well as a floor plan of the school where children labelled their language use around school. The control group took part solely in the questionnaire surveys. Further data was collected from children’s interactions during the workshops (some being transcribed and translated) and from their poster presentations, as well as from interviews with children and teachers. In addition, Jackie carried out her own geosemiotic surveys, photographing multilingual signage, student work and other media in all shared areas of the school.
What did we find?
Of interest was children’s interpretation of the term ‘languages’ in the schoolscape, as more than 15% of the photos did not actually have language in them, but included such things as a Chinese New Year rehearsal, the Music room where they sing in Spanish, and material objects which looked ‘foreign’. Less encouraging was the fact that 44% of the photographs were taken in the ‘languages corridor’ where the majority of home language lessons take place, with the most common photo being the signage (for example ‘FRENCH’) outside particular classrooms. This finding highlighted what we refer to as the ‘spatial regime of languages’, with many children noting in the surveys that they only use their languages in the specific language classrooms. This contrasts with what their teachers and the researchers observe, which is that the children use the languages flexibly in the classroom, playground and other areas around school. In later surveys, some children did extend the range of spaces to include areas such as the reception area, where they meet their parents at the end of the school day.
Values and ideologies attached to the students’ languages were, in part, influenced by the students’ perceptions of where languages were used and how they were represented in the school. Of the 11 creative projects, 8 used nationalist symbols such as maps or flags, as was also evident in the linguistic landscape of the school. The Spanish language group chose to make a poster with clay models of traditional foods, and then embarked on a discussion of which nation (Spain or Mexico) could claim nachos as their own. The Japanese group included origami cranes in their design, although one Japanese child did insist to his classmates that ‘not all Japanese can do origami’. One pair of children, however, decided that all languages were of equal value and created a multilingual poster of greetings, later displayed in the school reception area.
Whilst ISL offers 23 home languages as part of the curriculum, this does not represent the full range of languages spoken by the student population. This became evident when a Hindi-speaker, with the help of his Spanish-speaking classmate, created a large-sized poster containing a map, a flag and a petition at the end stating ‘Not everybody has mother tongue class of their own language, so we have created this, so that the Hindus can have their own mother tongue class’. The lack of language status afforded to some languages within the schoolscape could be said to echo the value attached to the languages in the wider UK context. For example, we noted in the geosemiotic survey that the largest language group within the school, namely Arabic, had only one instance of Arabic displayed outside the classroom.
What next?
The current paucity of research on multilingualism in international schools means it is important for this rich field of data to be made available to researchers who are keen to engage with schools and teachers. Collaboration between academics, teacher-researchers, teachers and children can bear fruit in multiple and unexpected ways. This project led many of the involved teachers to reflect on their classroom practice, in particular the need to explicitly encourage students to use their full linguistic repertoire in their learning. Later in the project, Jackie noted that the ‘concentration of language classrooms in one corridor resulted in the physical compartmentalization of languages and the lack of visibility of multilingualism in the rest of the schoolscape’, which highlights the need for school-wide reflection on the use of teaching space, as well as signage and displays that reflect the languages of the students – and not ‘uneven multilingualism’. Since the project, the term ‘linguistic landscape’ has made its way into the school’s language policy, which is most certainly an excellent starting point for bringing about a change to practice.
With personal and professional thanks to Jackie and Jean-Marc for the opportunity to collaborate in this research project.
Reference
The research described in this article has also been published in the BAAL Newsletter, winter 2020, 116, 9-10. Available via https://www.baal.org.uk/ wp-content/uploads/2020/02/BAAL-News_116_Winter2020.pdf
