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Linguistic Landscapes And The Navigation Of New Settings: A Phenomenological Self-Study Of Signage On My First Trip Abroad And Implications For Teaching Literacy, Lindsay Persohn

Literacy Practice and Research

Landry and Bourhis (1997) are credited with coining the term linguistic landscapes, a term which they defined as “the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings [combined] to form the linguistic landscape [of a given region]” (p. 25). In this phenomenological (Patton, 1990) self-study, I explored the linguistic landscapes of three unfamiliar countries during a forty-five-day summer research and leisure trip. I analyzed the photographic data I collected to understand what information I gained from the signs, how I used the information in visual images to …