An exercise into linguistic landscapes

This week we started looking at the physical spaces around ISL in terms of linguistic use as experienced by students. We created a floor plan of the school and looked at how the students use the formal and informal areas differently at different times and how language is used in these formal and informal settings. What we created was the start of a linguistic landscape exercise which is a fairly new area of study. It draws from a number of academic disciplines including sociolinguistics, psychology and applied linguistics among others. Whether we expand on this in future sessions will partly depend on the decisions made in our methodology design and ethics session next week. This is the point at which we will make key decisions about how we are going to approach our research question and therefore how we will collect our data.