ABSTRACT
While the study of the linguistic landscape (LL) is emerging in various domains of inquiry (Gorter 2006; Spolsky, this volume) such as ecology, literacy research, sociocultural studies, urban sociology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and linguistic anthropology (Shohamy and Waksman, this volume), it has heretofore not drawn much attention in the field of education. This is somewhat paradoxical since the study of linguistic landscape traces its roots to research conducted with youth and work on literacy, both areas of primary interest in education. Foundational work cited in studies of the LL (e.g., in Cenoz and Gorter 2006) was conducted in psycholinguistic research on adolescents’ responses to signs in their environment (Landry and Bourhis 1997) and in studies of readers’ interactions with print in contexts of diversity (Scollon and Scollon 2003). While much recent work has concentrated on documenting what print appears in particular geographic locations and on articulating an interdisciplinary theoretical framework, relatively few studies of the linguistic landscape have continued to examine interactions with text in different languages among young readers and writers.
