The influence of linguistic landscape as a pedagogical resource on literacy development in primary schools in Lira City

Abstract

Schools, as public places, are sites in which the discernible language(s) on signs tell(s) a lot about the discourse(s) in place. Educscapes1 (ES), therefore, reveal the circulating discourses in place within schools. However, little is yet known about the creation of these educscapes signage and the decision behind their creation. Among the grey areas surrounding signage found in school sites are the questions about the nature of signs, their authorship and the purpose(s) for their creation as well as how they are used in such environments. To answer these questions, I surveyed the educational sites of four schools in Lira City, that is, two government schools and two privately owned schools, to document their linguistic landscaping practices in literacy development of their learners, using questionnaires, interviews, observation and photography. I analysed the data using triangulation, informed by nexus analysis, which sheds light on the convergence of the historical body of teachers as social actors, who take the primary role in sign making; the interaction order in a panopticon setup, which provides the environment for placement and interaction with the signs, and the discourses in place, which act as ‘gates’ to literacy development. The findings show that linguistic landscaping in school sites (i.e., both government and privately owned schools) is used to develop learners’ oral language skills such as alphabetic principles, phonemic awareness, phonological and orthographic processing, numeracy skills, their symbolic competencies, pragmatic competencies, visual literacy skills, and their reading and writing skills. These findings confirm that linguistic landscaping offers positive affordances for the development of learners’ literacy skills in general and teachers should be aware of this and incorporate the use of linguistic landscaping in their lessons during their classroom interactions with learners. What remains unclear yet is what constraints linguistic landscaping has or may have on learners’ literacy development, if any