Linguistic landscapes in the foreign language classroom:

About the session

The European Project "LoCALL - Local Linguistic Landscapes for global language education in the school context" (taking place between 2019 and 2022) is the starting point of this discussion. I will present the theoretical underpinnings of the project, such as the values attached to multimodal linguistic landscapes, global language education and plurilingual competence, showing the connections between these. After presenting the activities and products expected by the end of the three years, I will focus on the data collected during the first training event (taking place in June 2020) and their international, multilingual, and collaborative nature. I will focus on how the collaborative and multilingual discussion around linguistic landscapes allows the participants – teachers and teacher trainers from around the world – to go beyond a mainstream visual understanding of linguistic landscapes and embrace a more inclusive perception of it, collaboratively envisioning multilingual and multimodal pedagogies for their contexts.

About Dr. Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer

Dr. Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer is Associate Professor at the University of Hamburg (Germany). She has taken part in several international projects on the development of the Intercomprehension across Romance Languages and, more recently, in European projects dealing with multilingual pedagogies in foreign language learning and teacher education. She coordinates the Erasmus Plus project LoCALL - Local Linguistic Landscapes for global language education in the school context (2019-2022). She has published extensively about multilingual interaction, intercomprehension between Romance Languages, foreign language teacher education, and pluralistic approaches to languages and cultures. Recent publications include the 2019 “Visualising Multilingual Lives. More than words” co-edited with Paula Kalaja (Multilingual Matters), a BAAL Prize 2020 finalist.