Schoolscape and social conditions in secondary schools

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jannis Androutsopoulos
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509468991

The project investigates the linguistic landscape of educational institutions ('schoolscape') and related perceptions and evaluations of teachers and students on the example of secondary schools with different social conditions. The project's context is Linguistic Landscape research, which empirically investigates forms, functions, and perceptions of spatially-bound written language in public spaces and institutional settings. In Germany, the linguistic landscape is a rarely studied aspect of communication in schools. International research shows that signs and other stationary texts (e.g. posters, notices, graffiti) are produced by school actors, fulfil various communicative functions in everyday school life, are linked to communicative practices of knowledge transfer, and contribute to the reproduction of dominant language and political ideologies. However, many studies are limited to the analysis of multilingual signage in the context of minoritized languages, and relations between the linguistic landscape and the stratification of the school system have hardly been explored. This project addresses this gap and aims to advance schoolscape research in Germany and to identify connections between the linguistic landscape and school diversity. The research will take place at four secondary schools in Hamburg, which differ in terms of school type (district schools/Stadtteilschulen and grammar schools/Gymnasien) and social conditions ('difficult' to 'privileged' conditions). Three school-comparative objectives are pursued: (a) classification of space-bound texts according to discourse type and genre, (b) multimodal investigation of knowledge-transmitting texts produced by teachers and students, (c) perception of the linguistic landscape by teachers and students in relation to the social situation of their school. The methodological design innovatively combines two approaches, namely the linguistic and multimodal analysis of signs on the one hand, and a discourse-analytical-ethnographic study of teachers and students on the other. Signs and other texts are photographically recorded in indoor and outdoor spaces of the researched schools and subjected to software-based annotation. The data collection with school stakeholders includes a joint inspection of the school space, expert interviews, and group discussions around student and learning posters. The research design integrates school students, who have been largely neglected in previous studies. The project will produce new knowledge about an area of communication in German schools that has received little attention so far. Project results and methods open up various possibilities of knowledge transfer to schools.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants