Linguistic Landscape Fieldwork

Working with linguistic landscape projects not only allows educators to connect classroom learning with multimodal communication modes in urban places, but also help learners explore the social and situated meanings of language in the public space. Boston is ranked as one of the most diverse cities in the US. Working as a Chinese as a foreign language teacher in Boston, it caught my attention that many of the public signs contain Chinese, cantonese (a dialect in China) and other languages. To help my Chinese students become aware of how Chinese and other languages are present in Boston and the local communities in China, I designed the linguistic landscape based virtual exchange project for both my novice level and advanced level Chinese learners. For the lower level Chinese class, the main goal is to help students notice the presence of Chinese in Boston and raise their orthographic awareness in Chinese in Boston, and to compare the linguistic landscape in Boston with their Chinese native speaking partners’ hometowns. The goal for advanced level Chinese learners is to critically interpret the multiple layered meanings of the signs, practice their translation skills, and explore ethnic and linguistic diversity in both Boston and their partners’ hometowns through the lens of linguistic landscape.

(a quote from a student in LC319)

“我以为天津只有中国历史，文化，食物，等等。我跟家鸿沟通以后，发现天津是个很大的城市。也学到天津有不同国家的文化街，比如意大利街和自己的古文化街。虽然意大利街中国古文化街很不同，但都有那个国家的餐馆和建筑。天津的意大利街的言语景观就含有意大利语，而古文化街上面都是中文，也有英文，为了服务国际游客。我以前不知道天津是那么大的城市，现在知道它比波士顿大很多。未来，我想知道天津有没有更多不同国家的文化街，也想上网查别的中国城市有没有一样的文化街。

"Originally, I believed that 天津 was a city containing history and culture from China alone. After meeting with my exchange partner, I learned that 天津 is a rather large city that contains many separate cultural districts serving as tourist destinations. My partner gave me a virtual tour of the Italian cultural district and the traditional Chinese cultural district. Although both areas were vastly different, both the Italian and Chinese cultural districts contained an array of cuisine and architecture that was representative of both cultures. The language landscape of Italian Street in Tianjin contains Italian, while Ancient Culture Street contains Chinese and English to help international tourists understand the signs. I also did not realize how big 天津 is compared to Boston. For further meetings, I would like to know whether there are any other cultural districts in 天津 and if other cities in China have similar streets.”

Impacts:

Novice-level students can identify the radical of the characters and the purpose of using the characters in the signs.

Students from the advanced Chinese classes were able to evaluate the translation of the bilingual or multilingual signs properly. In the left corner image below, a famous Chinese dish 芥蓝牛肉 in a restaurant’s menu was translated into beef with broccoli, and the student argued that broccoli wasn’t the vege used to make this dish, cause chinese 芥蓝 is a leaf vegetable with thick, flat, glossy blue-green leaves.

Students can also be aware of the translanguaging phenomenon and the purpose of translanguging practice. (see the right image below) The example the students provided in the multimodal project shows their understanding of a combined use of cantonese (Ga ga) and English translation of the Chinese characters (海鲜饭馆) (seafood). They also found out that the Chinese restaurant names in Brookline, MA mainly use simplified Chinese whereas those restaurants in Chinatown used lots of traditional Chinese characters due to the differences of the demographic in these two neighborhoods.