Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Orient Institut İstanbul Workshop: Linguistic Landscapes of İstanbul, İstanbul, Türkiye, 30 Kasım - 02 Aralık 2023, cilt.00, sa.0
Proposal for Linguistic Landscape of Istanbul: Possibilities and Prospects with Orient
Institut Istanbul
Nov 30 2023- Dec 2 2023 Galata, Istanbul
Reflecting on Bi- and-Multi-lingualism in Schoolscapes- Linguistic Landscapes at Primary
Educational Settings in Turkey
Brown (2012) introduced the term schoolscape when she studied images and artefacts in the
foyers and classrooms of the schools in Estonia. Brown found schoolscapes represent ideologies
and identities about the local varieties. Gorter explained how this term has been evolving over the
years thanks to the contributions of researchers in this field. Landry and Bourhis (1997) defined it
as “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 terrority, region, or urban agglomeration’ (p. 25). Gorter (2018) adds this
was limiting the scope of linguistic landscapes and the succeeding studies demonstrated the term
is morphing into wider contexts and scopes (Sebba, 2010; Shohamy & Waksman, 2009). A surge
of studies in recent years as the number of publications increased from 30 to 600 from 2007 to
2017 (Gorter, 2018). Gorter (2018) detected promising spots for future research studies with
semi-public institutional contexts, including educational settings. Further, on this matter,
Shohamy and Waksman (2009) suggested “education as an institution [that] offers opportunities
to act as a powerful tool for…. meaningful language learning” (p.326). Examining educational
linguistic landscapes can lead to unearthing the micro-educational processes within school
dynamics in relation to pedagogical and instructional decisions being made and macro-
educational processes involved through language planning and language education policies in
Turkey.
According to Gorter (2018), linguistic landscapes in schools can serve as powerful pedagogical
tools; however, schoolscapes are even more powerful to shed light on “language awareness,
multilingual literacy, multimodality, identities, ideologies or the functions of the signs” (p. 82).
There are other studies which take linguistic landscapes as a venue to discuss multimodality,
multilingualism, and multiliteracy rather than source to learn English (Clemente, Andrade &
Martins, 2012; Poveda, 2012)
Schooling in two languages is becoming more and more common across the world (Cenoz,
Genesee & Gorter, 2013 in the European context and Shin and Kominski, 2010 for the United
States context). Bilingualism, thus, is the norm. Butler (2015) claims despite the increasing
number of speakers learning English at early grade levels, many children do not use much
English in their daily routines. In other words, children do not receive enough amount of
exposure to English other than school contexts, which are also insufficient in supporting
continuous language learning with authentic linguistic input.
One sub-dimension of the discussion on the EYL policy is the time allocation. This is a valid
observation in Turkish education context as time allocation greatly varies from public to private
sectors. While at public schools modest time with roughly one hour per week of EYL. The time
of exposure to English is limited. In such EYL contexts English is taught primarily by one
teacher (one voice) which limits the opportunity for young learners to hear a wider-range of
English with authentic and fluent exposure. Last and most importantly, in such classes learners
do not develop some fluency outside the school therefore those children may have no models of
authentic and localized ‘children’s English’ (Johnstone, 2020). In such program, the two major
goals would be first to help learners develop positive attitude to English language and secondly
develop language awareness. The private K-4 contexts in Turkey’s education system show great
variation in terms of richness and pervasiveness of schoolscapes and such contexts formed the
main context for the present study.
The debate in the present study is to what extent Turkey’s primary grade-level schoolscapes
expose bi-lingual and multi-lingual content to early English learners? If so, for what purposes? In
other terms, can it be said that Turkey’s primary school contexts- also called as schoolscapes-
promote bilingualism or multilingualism? Linguistic landscapes can be defined as the visual
display of languages through signs, billboards, advertisements, and graffiti, which “is not a direct
reflection of the official statuses of the languages used nor the relationship between languages”
(Wardhaugh et al., 2015, p.86).
In the present work-in-progress, posters, signs, displays in and out of classrooms, in the hallways,
dining rooms, sports court, schoolyard, stairs, technology labs and all have been recorded to
further analyze within bilingualism and multilingualism perspectives. The analyzed entries (over
300 snapshots from 10 different institutions) which are photos of signs, billboards, notifications,
posters were analyzed for language selection (language/s selected) and language prominence
(language in the forefront vs in the background). Preliminary results suggested promotion of
bilingualism mainly rather than a multilingual approach in primary education institutions in
Turkey. The signs are great resources instructionally as they support peripheral learning. They are
pedagogically safe as children can interact with those signs on a daily basis. The study
implications are for educators and policy makers to highlight the essential position of
schoolscapes for early English learners’ authentic, interactive, engaging English as a foreign
language learning in an EFL context.