124092 VK BEd 09.2: VK Linguistics and Language Education (2025W)

We all know that language plays diverse and crucial roles in education and that it is continuously present in teaching and learning. While certain practices, such as teacher talk, student contributions in class or exam writing, have been at the centre of pedagogical and applied linguistic attention for a long time, this cannot be said for the public presence of language in educational spaces. It required the sociolinguistic research area of ‘linguistic landscapes’ (LL) to recognise that the display of language in public space is also valuable for educational concerns as it opens questions such as: Which language/s is/are used on such posters and signs? What other semiotic modes are drawn upon, and for what purposes? What’s the relationship between a linguistic landscape and the multilingual constellation of students and teachers? What’s the role of English in linguistic landscapes? In what ways can LL research support English language teaching and learning?

It is questions like these that we will focus on in this course, both from a literature-based angle as well as an empirical perspective. More precisely, we will deal with topics such as language contact and World Englishes, Anglicisms and written code-switching, multilingualism and multimodality, language in education and linguistic landscape research. While the first two thirds of the course will allow students to gain theoretical familiarity with these topics and how to work with them practically, the last third of the course is dedicated for project work, with all students working in teams on self-selected educational linguistic landscapes.

This course combines mini-lectures, assignments, reading-based group work and discussion, and student-directed research work leading to a presentation and a written project report. Students who decide to write their bachelor paper will produce a research paper based on their LL project (instead of the project report).