Languages Around Us: (In)visibility Matters

This chapter addresses the question of how students in primary education might gain awareness of the languages in their immediate environment as well as critical skills for reflecting on the value of multiple languages in their lives through the pedagogical use of Linguistic Landscapes. To consider this issue, the chapter describes and analyses the implementation of a project based on the discovery of linguistic landscapes and the adaptation of this approach for Homescapes with students in 5th and 6th grade in a primary school in Catalonia. This adjustment to the project was necessary due to the school closing during the global pandemic. During the online implementation the authors collected data sets in different formats (collages, individual and collectively authored language lists, surveys) and then analyzed them both qualitatively and quantitatively, according to the nature of the data collected. The data analysis corroborates previous studies on linguistic landscapes within the pedagogical field which show that young learners, even in asynchronous, digitalized instruction, can gain critical skills and reflect on the value of multiple languages in their lives.