This talk identifies three dominant paradigms of research in the field of linguistic landscape (the study of multilingualism in public spaces), while drawing lessons from each for L2 teachers and learners. The first paradigm offers a synchronic view of competing cultural and political interests as they are visible in variables such as code choice, orthographic conventions, and the pragmatic functions of signs. The second takes up the more recent qualitative turn in Linguistic Landscape Studies, whereby researchers utilize ethnographic and other qualitative methods in order to ‘look behind the signs’ into histories, cultures, and people’s lived experience. In turn, the third paradigm highlights the diverse and sometimes invisible ways in which people make sense of themselves and each other, as seen through lenses such as affect and embodiment, virtuality and mobility, protest and social transformation, and imagination and memory. I argue that, while these approaches may seem mutually incompatible, language teachers can profitably apply them together to develop learners’ repertoires of strategies for perceiving, understanding, and transforming real-world discourses in place.
