Reflecting on Bi- and Multilingualism in Schoolscapes - Linguistic Landscapes at Primary Educational Settings in Turkey


Ünal Gezer M.

Orient Institut İstanbul Workshop: Linguistic Landscapes of İstanbul, İstanbul, Turkey, 30 November - 02 December 2023, vol.00, no.0

  • Publication Type: Conference Paper / Summary Text
  • Volume: 00
  • City: İstanbul
  • Country: Turkey
  • TED University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

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.