The fluid use of multiple linguistic and semiotic resources as a single repertoire.
Published in Chapter:
Raising Awareness of the City as a Text: Multimodal, Multicultural, and Multilingual Resources for Education
Amparo Clavijo Olarte (Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Colombia), Rosa Alejandra Medina (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA), Daniel Calderon-Aponte (Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Colombia), Alejandra Rodríguez (Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Colombia), Kewin Prieto (Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Colombia), and María Clara Náder (Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, Colombia)
Copyright: © 2023
|Pages: 26
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-5022-2.ch013
Abstract
In this chapter, the authors explore the semiotic landscape of the city to analyze multimodal, multicultural, and multilingual resources for language and literacy education. In this ethnographic study, teacher-researchers explore urban literacies as social, artistic, political, cultural, and pedagogical practices that connect different community actors, diverse texts, and local realities. Data were collected through community tours, photographs (a corpus of 387 photographs), and semi-structured interviews with graffiti artists and community inhabitants. The findings reveal that semiotic and linguistic landscapes that surround schools can be harnessed to develop critical place awareness and to recognize the audiences and purposes of multimodal texts embedded in the environments. It also leads to the recognition of multicultural and linguistic diversity that is rarely reflected in school-centered curriculum and decontextualized textbooks.