Linguistic landscapes tasks in Global Englishes teacher education

Abstract

This cross-sectional study attempts to investigate the impacts of linguistic landscape (LL) tasks on EFL teacher candidates’ understanding of English in local and global contexts. To this end, three cohorts of student teachers carried out LL fieldwork, uploaded images of English signage to an LL application, Lingscape, and submitted a mini research paper on the use of Englishes. They also wrote a reflective journal featuring a discussion of their experiences. Qualitative content analysis was utilized to interpret the data for the purpose of illustrating major themes emerging from the data. The findings highlighted a heightened awareness among student teachers towards locating and reflecting on Englishes in everyday contexts, an improved understanding of English as a lingua franca and Global Englishes, and their intentions to adopt Global-Englishes-oriented language teaching practices in the future. The study concludes by discussing the implications of this approach, and calls for a wider inclusion of LL-centred tasks in EFL teacher education curricula.