| Session | ||
015B: Teachers’ Education and Multilingualism
M. Ünal Gezer Sociolinguistically-Aware Pre-Service Teachers: Raising Awareness in Multilingual, Multimodal Schoolscapes of Primary Education Settings in Turkey | ||
| Presentations | ||
Negotiating Multilingual Identity by Swiss and Maltese Student-Teachers 1University of Malta, Malta; 2Pädagogische Hochschule Luzern Multilingual countries like Malta and Switzerland are confronted with the co-existence of different languages and dialects, and of the dominance of major standard languages like English and German (Camilleri Grima, 2016 ; Krompák in press). This superdiversity is reflected in the linguistic identity of individuals and of the society. The linguistic landscape has in recent years been taken as a visible phenomenon indexing the presence of numerous speech communities, and simultaneously of the plurilinguistic and multicultural identity of the members within a specific geographical area (e.g. Blackwood et al, 2016). While the linguistic landscape is widely investigated as a research field of multilingualism in public spaces (Blommaert, 2013; Gorter & Cenoz, 2024), there is little research about the relevance of semiotic signs in private spaces such as linguistic homescapes (Krompák, 2018, 2021; Melo-Pfeifer, 2021). In our research study we investigated the linguistic identity of 24 Maltese and Swiss student-teachers by applying homescape as a visual approach in an international online exchange. In this presentation we address the following research questions: i. What choices do student-teachers make to represent their linguistic identity? ii. How do student-teachers negotiate their linguistic identity through the online exchange? iii. To what extent can the complexity of multilingual identities be explored through the homescape? By applying a participative visual approach (Holm, 2018), photographs of linguistic and semiotic signs (N=109) and written protocols (N=24), have been collected and analysed (Mayring, 2015). First, the findings shed light on the relevance of intercultural exchange in the negotiation of multilingual identities. Second, the reflection on participants` linguistic practices raised critical cultural and linguistic awareness. Lastly, the homescape appeared to be a valuable and useful resource to explore linguistic identity, and to motivate student-teachers to further examine the possibilities provided by the homescape for professional development and as a pedagogical tool. | ||