Spatializing Language Studies

Front matter

Educational Linguistics

Sébastien Dubreil David Malinowski Hiram H. Maxim Editors

Spatializing Language Studies

Preface

This volume has emerged after a long period of incubation and is situated at the confluence of a wide range of intentions and activities. First, it was our desire to pursue the conversation on — and exploration of — the potential of using Linguistic Landscape (LL) Studies for the purpose of language and culture learning, a project that has been the better part of a decade in the making. Our common conversations started after initial forays into linguistic landscape-mediated pedagogical interventions we conducted separately in Berkeley, Vienna, and Paris before serendipitously sharing these experiences with each other at the 2015 annual conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in Toronto, which generated an excitement that coalesced at the Linguistic Landscape 7 workshop at UC Berkeley. This led to the organization of a colloquium at the 2016 AAAL Conference in Orlando, which ultimately resulted in the publication of the 2020 volume Language Teaching in the Linguistic Landscape: Mobilizing Pedagogy in Public Space, which garnered attention from scholars and practitioners at the same time as it opened up more spaces for ideation, discussion, and pedagogical innovation.

Second, it gave us the opportunity to broaden the scope of the work by including a more diverse range of experts hailing from various locations, disciplines, and pedagogical orientations, and operating in very different contexts. Following our work on the aforementioned volume, we knew where to go to fill some of this space and reached out to the authors assembled in this volume. We cannot overstate our gratitude to these eighteen scholars whose patience was most likely tried as we worked through the editorial process and logistics of this publication. Their commitment to the ethos of the project and support throughout go above and beyond the call of duty. The quality of their work and the rigor and integrity of their approach vis-a-vis their students and the communities they inhabit is commendable.

Third, we wanted to renew our commitment to the initial intention to make this type of work widely available by ensuring that the work presented in this volume be openly accessible, which, while anchoring it in a specific chronology, also affords the possibility of making its content dynamic over time. Our intentionality to make vi Preface this an open-access volume was met by a receptive team at Springer and, for that, we are also grateful. Our gratitude first goes to Francis Hult, who saw the value in expanding the scenery of LL-mediated pedagogies in this way and connected us with the team at Springer who made this possible: Helen van der Stelt, Natalie Rieborn, and Anita van der Linden-Rachmat, whose guidance on all aspects of this publication has been invaluable.

In the past years, we were buoyed by positive energy coming from formal and informal conversations with colleagues at LL Workshops, conferences, and webinars; by a collaborative process that carried its share of trials and tribulations but, more importantly, brought joy, fulfillment, and intellectual growth; and, finally, by our students’ work and sense of wonderment as they engage deeply with the linguistic landscape of their campus, neighborhood, cities, leading them, at times, to question, re-envision, and re-articulate their sense of self, their relationship to language and culture, and their place in the world. Their willingness to do so is admirable and, in and of itself, a reason to offer this volume in hope that other colleagues will implement their own version of the experiences presented here.

Our gratitude extends to many people who have supported this volume. Of note, we would like to thank Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl (Center for Language Study, Yale University) and Stéphane Charitos (Language Resource Center, Columbia University), who have been there in various capacities from the inception of this journey, as interlocutors, as supporters, as organizers of events at both Yale and Columbia, all of which have nurtured this project. Of course, numerous colleagues and entities at our respective institutions need to be credited for their support, be it intellectual, logistic, or financial. From Emory University, we would like to thank Susan Tamasi (Emory Linguistics Program), Michael Elliot (former Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences), Yang Li (Emory Center for Digital Scholarship), and Sarah McKee (Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry). From San José State University, our thanks extend to Shannon Miller (Dean of the SJSU College of Humanities and the Arts), Jason Aleksander (Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Success in the SJSU College of Humanities and the Arts), and Emily Chan (Associate Dean of Research and Scholarship in the SJSU Library). At Carnegie Mellon University, we express our gratitude to Keith Webster (Helen and Henry Posner, Jr. Dean of the University Libraries), The Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences under the leadership of Richard Scheines (Bess Family Dean of the College), and Anne Lambright (Head of the CMU Department of Modern Languages). Lastly, our thanks extend to the business managers and administrative staff who keep it all running.

In closing, it is our hope that this volume will indeed further the conversation on teaching language in the linguistic landscape by offering frameworks, trajectories, and strategies to spatialize language learning and enable learners to re-articulate

Preface vii their understanding of the physical environment in a manner that opens up the multi-faceted meaning-making potential and semiotically rich interpretation of each encounter in/of place.

Pittsburgh, PA, USA Sébastien Dubreil San Jose, CA, USA David Malinowksi

Atlanta, GA, USA Hiram Maxim

Contents

Introduction: Spatializing Language Studies in the David Malinowski, Hiram H. Maxim, and Sébastien Dubreil

Part I Reimagining Learning Spaces Through the Linguistic Landscape Building the Politeness Repertoire Through Elyse Ritchey

Exploring Language and Culture in the Novice Chinese Fei Yu, Aleidine J. Moeller, and Jia Lu

Multilingual Landscapes in Telecollaboration: Margarita Vinagre and Reyes Llopis-Garcia

Part II Places Made and Remade Through Learning in the Linguistic Landscape

Agency and Policy: Who Controls the Linguistic Robert A. Troyer

Uncovering Spanish Harlem: Ethnographic Linguistic

Landscape Projects in an Advanced Content-Based

A Collaborative Asset Mapping Approach to the Linguistic Landscape: Learning from the community’s Linguistic

Christian Ruvalcaba and Michelle Aguilera

Part III Dislocating Selves and Locating Worlds in the Linguistic Landscape An Educational Perspective on Community Languages

Olga Bever and Mahmoud Azaz Multilingual Linguistic Landscapes of New York City

Irina A. Sekerina and Patricia J. Brooks

Indigenous Conceptual Cartographies and Landscape

Michael Zimmerman Jr, Margaret O’ Donnell Noodin, Patricia Mayes, and Bernard C. Perley

Contents

Contributors

Michelle Aguilera University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA Mahmoud Azaz University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Olga Bever University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

Patricia J. Brooks College of Staten Island, New York, NY, USA

Sébastien Dubreil Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Juan Pablo Jiménez-Caicedo Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Reyes Llopis-Garcia Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Jia Lu Department of Modern Languages, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA

David Malinowski Department of Linguistics and Language Development, San José State University, San Jose, CA, USA

Hiram H. Maxim German Studies Department, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Patricia Mayes University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Aleidine J. Moeller Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

Margaret O’Donnell Noodin University of | Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Bernard C. Perley University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Elyse Ritchey National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland

Christian Ruvalcaba University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA xi xii Contributors

Trina A. Sekerina College of Staten Island, New York, NY, USA

Robert A. Troyer Western Oregon University, Monmouth, OR, USA

Margarita Vinagre Autónoma University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

Fei Yu Department of Modern Languages, Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA

Michael Zimmerman Jr University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Introduction: Spatializing Language M Studies in the Linguistic Landscape EAA

David Malinowski, Hiram H. Maxim, and Sébastien Dubreil

Abstract As the assemblage of visible, audible, and otherwise textualized languages of public space, the linguistic landscape forms a rich context for understanding how material and environmental affordances affect language learning, and how language teachers can bring their L2 curricula to life. Whether it is within the four walls of a school, in a nearby neighborhood, or in virtual telecollaborative environments, the chapters of this volume illustrate how such diverse configurations of space lend themselves to language and literacy learning, while also contributing to learners’ critical cultural and historical awareness. Before inviting the reader to the volume’s nine chapters, this introduction outlines the history and significance of “space” in language teaching and learning research, a topic of significant interest and innovation in L2 education today. It then offers a framework for the spatialization of language teaching, that is, a pedagogy that is linguistically and culturally complex, geographically situated, historically informed, dialogically realized, and socially engaged. Whether one endeavors to teach in a traditional classroom, or immersed in the sights and sounds of outdoor spaces, or even from one's desktop at home, language teaching with the linguistic landscape is evaluated for its potential to extend the human, symbolic, and critical dimensions of L2 learning.

Keywords Space and place in language teaching - Spatial literacies - Spatialization - Language ecologies - Designing learning environments - Community-based language learning - Dislocation and relocation in L2 learning - Transcultural learning

D. Malinowski ( Department of Linguistics and Language Development, San José State University, San Jose, CA, USA

e-mail: david.malinowski@sjsu.edu

H. H. Maxim German Studies Department, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA e-mail: hmaxim@emory.edu

S. Dubreil Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: sdubreil @ andrew.cmu.edu

© The Author(s) 2023 1 S. Dubreil et al. (eds.), Spatializing Language Studies, Educational Linguistics 62, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-03 1-39578-9_1

1 Introducing This Volume: Time Again to Think About Space

The origins of this volume can be traced back to initial conversations at the 7th Linguistic Landscape Workshop (LL7) in Berkeley, California, followed by further discussions at LL8 in Liverpool before plans crystalized in Orlando, Florida at the annual meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in 2016. Since that time, work on language and literacy teaching in the linguistic landscape has expanded considerably (Bever & Richardson, 2020; Bradley, et al., 2018; Krompak et al., 2021; Li & Marshall, 2020; Malinowski, 2018; Malinowski et al., 2020; Maxim, 2020; Niedt & Seals, 2020; Roos & Nicholas, 2020; Shang & Xie, 2020; Wisniewska, 2019; Zheng, et al., 2018). At the same time, the prospect of expanding our teaching and learning into new spaces is now faced with a pandemic-induced world order that is challenging us to rethink how to make pedagogical use of spaces that have become even more dynamic and ephemeral. If our sites of engagement become too remote, locked down, or inaccessible, how are we as educators able to facilitate students’ participation in exploring the ways in which language, people, and place co-construct each other? Indeed, the mobility that we foregrounded in our earlier work (Malinowski et al., 2020) is now tested like no one could have imagined just a few years ago. From the more immediate challenges to classroom learning posed by masks, physical distancing, and the continued threat of infection, to larger considerations such as the inaccessibility of—or much restrained access to— study abroad and the feasibility of community-based learning projects, language and literacy teaching in the linguistic landscape finds itself having to reconsider the places where it can operate. For example, does the virtual access that Zoom and other new means of communication have afforded us provide alternative possibilities for understanding material, social, geographic, and historical contexts?

Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic will not have long-lasting effects on our movements, communications, and interactions. In that sense, the global pandemic has presented itself as a hinge event, that is to say, as an occurrence that will radically reshape the world we live in. One of the primary ways in which the pandemic has done this is in how it has forced us to re-envision notions of space and place both in the built environment and in the social environment (Lou et al., 2022). Seemingly familiar contexts have taken on new functions and configurations - the living room becomes a classroom, the meeting backdrop becomes a palm tree-lined tropical beach, the deserted city street becomes a pop-up bike lane. Words such as “confinement,” “social distancing,” and “quarantine” have all taken on new meanings in this new context and they all point to how we inhabit our social and physical worlds. Previously unseen additional signage has appeared, from one-way aisles at the supermarket to multimodal posters indicating whether and how to wear face coverings, a practice that was sometimes controversial in intercultural settings and has now become controversial in intra-cultural settings (e.g., pro- vs. anti-maskers). This situation has also made us more aware of the environment in which we live, as well as the language and the people in it, if for no other

Introduction: Spatializing Language Studies in the Linguistic Landscape 3 reason that we spent more time inside since travel was curtailed, and work and schooling often happened from home or in a much smaller geographical perimeter. In this context, we have been called to notice how the use of language and other semiotic resources in the public space shapes the space as much as it is shaped by it.

The extent and import of these changes are captured effectively in Adami et al.’s (2020) analysis of communication and interaction during the pandemic, where they identify a “changing semiotic regime” in which “the dimensions of social interaction have changed their combinatory possibilities, as the times and paces, the spaces and places of our activities and roles have had to change” (p. 5). Specifically, they point to how the restrictions and dangers of the pandemic have resulted in many of our naturalized and habituated practices’ becoming no longer viable, causing us to reflect about these past practices while also looking to establish possible new ones. They term this period of reflection and creation a “re-disciplining process” that requires people to “reconsider, replan and recreate ways in which they conduct activities, interact with others and manage space” (Adami, 2020). In discussing the pandemic’s effect on notions of space, Adami et al. (2020) highlight the blurring of traditional boundaries between public and private, and real and virtual spaces, which have resulted from this process of resituating ourselves in a pandemicinflected world order.

In this way, the altered social, semiotic, and educational landscapes of the Covid era form a lens for this volume that is both inescapable and appropriate. While the nine chapters that comprise the volume reflect teaching and research endeavors from years leading up to the pandemic, we cannot but read them now in light of the collective experiences of 2020 and beyond. Chapters that extol the benefits of language learning activities in physical classrooms, on shared school grounds, in neighborhoods and cities that surround students’ usual places of learning, and in study abroad settings across national borders and accessible only by plane, train, or boat, must now first confront the reader’s skeptical question that has become all but second nature: “Yes, but can we still do such things today?” While the present volume, in origin, spirit, and substance, builds from the same set of pedagogical challenges and conceptual energies as did our earlier volume, Language teaching in the linguistic landscape: Mobilizing pedagogy in public space (Malinowski et al., 2020), we acknowledge that it cannot be read without considering the very loss of mobility experienced by language students, teachers, and researchers around the world since the onset of the pandemic.

At the same time, we see the recent profound curtailment of mobilities as yet another example of the ever changing conditions under which language teaching and learning have always taken place. Precisely for that reason, we center this volume around the concept of spatialization. Spatialization, as we elaborate below (see Sect. 3), highlights the interactions of learners and teachers and their textual, material, and environmental affordances over various scales of time as generative of space, as much as they may be constrained by it. Language learners and teachers must both adapt to (in the intransitive sense) their changing circumstances, while symbolically and/or materially adapting (in the transitive) circumstances to suit their needs. In terms of second language development, Lantolf, Poehner and Swain

(2018) remind us that “...cognitive processing does not depend on mechanisms inside of learners’ heads which are assumed to ensure that acquisition is the same no matter where it occurs (e.g., in everyday or classroom settings), but on the affordances encountered in different environments and on the nature of learners’ relations to these” (p. 8). Whether one endeavors to learn or teach language within the confines of a traditional classroom, or immersed in the sights and sounds of outdoor spaces replete with the L2, or quarantined at home with only online or print materials to support one’s practice, learners’ encounters with the affordances of their environments may be best seen as “relations” when the human and symbolic dimensions of the encounters are the pedagogical focus (as in Lantolf, Poehner, and Swain’s (2018) accounting). These relations may be further seen as “spatializations” when their materiality is also taken into account.

As the assemblage of visible, audible, and otherwise textualized languages of public space, the linguistic landscape forms a rich context for understanding how material and environmental affordances play an active role in language learning— and how language teachers can bring their L2 curricula to life (e.g., Bever & Richardson, 2020; Chern & Dooley, 2014; Chesnut et al., 2013; Malinowski, 2016; Maxim, 2020; Rowland, 2013; Sayer, 2010). This volume continues with the outward-oriented sense of purpose we articulated previously to “contribute to productive transformations in pedagogical practice and social action in language and culture classrooms” (Malinowski et al., 2020, p. 10), while returning with a renewed sense of urgency to the spatial practices of language teachers and learners, wherever and however they may find themselves in the world.

2 A Short History of Space in L2 Teaching and Learning

As evidenced in Niedt and Seals’ (2020) volume, detailing how people’s “naturalistic, everyday encounters [...] themselves can be a form of education, often in nontraditional educational settings” (p. 2) and Krompak, Ferndndez-Mallat, and Meyer’s (2021) volume revealing the ideological struggles and learning opportunities in the “educationscapes’ ‘of schools and communities, space and place are at the forefront of current inquiry into the dynamics of second language acquisition and learning (cf. Benson, 2021). However, beyond even the frame of linguistic and semiotic landscapes, the emergence in the past two decades of notions such as human-environmental ecologies of learning (e.g., Kramsch, 2002; van Lier, 2004) and the ‘wilding’ of language teaching in naturalistic activities (Dubreil & Thorne, 2017) was not without precedent. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see a direct lineage for spatial concerns in second language and literacy research at least as far back as the ascendance of Communicative Language Teaching in the 1970s and 1980s from the Grammar Translation and Audiolingual methods before it. In particular, the emphasis placed on the ‘authenticity’ of linguistic input for learners to negotiate created a need for authentic texts, real-world tasks, and so-called native speakers of the target language, even as these were often represented in idealized

Introduction: Spatializing Language Studies in the Linguistic Landscape 5 form through the “textual traces’‘of language textbooks and curricula (cf. Widdowson, 1998; Chapelle, 2020). The foregrounding of sociolinguistic, pragmatic and cultural elements in (communicative) competence, the growing use of corpora in materials development and teaching, and pedagogical approaches incorporating cultural exchange, global simulation, and even study abroad may all be seen as outcomes of the still relatively recent insistence upon ‘real world authenticity’ in L2 education.

One of the early works to raise awareness about the changing contexts for language use was the New London Group’s (1996) heavily cited manifesto, “Pedagogy of Multiliteracies,’ and its subsequent revisions (e.g., Cope & Kalantzis, 2015). Pointing to the expansion, if not explosion, of new forms of communication that arose from increasing globalization, mobility, and internet-driven connectedness, the New London Group (1996) called into question the efficacy of traditional approaches to literacy and literacy pedagogy and proposed instead the term “multiliteracies” to capture the dramatic growth of new contexts, new textual genres, and new modalities for communication. Indeed, the notion that literacies are plural and that they simultaneously involve radically different ways of knowing (each mode with its characteristic logics) echoes a key insight of spatial theorists of the time that “space” is not singular but “the sphere of possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality” (Massey, 2005, p. 9). The New London Group’s mobilization of visual, audio, gestural, and spatial modes in tandem with the linguistic mode as part of a composite literacies paradigm that would address “the realities of increasing local diversity and local connectedness” (New London Group, 1996, p. 64) has continued to offer important guidance for teachers in expanding language learners’ meaning-making options (e.g., Kern, 2000; Paesani et al., 2016; Swaffar & Arens, 2005).

At roughly the same time that the New London Group (1996) was highlighting new modes and contexts for communication, the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) was completing its National Standards project (1996) that looked to expand the U.S. language teaching profession’s conceptualization of language study to include interaction and even collaboration with communities where the target language was spoken. While the National Standards (1996) did not feature the new genres and modalities emphasized by the New London Group (1996), ACTFL’s inclusion of community as a locus of language use reflects the growing understanding in the profession of the need to consider a much wider range of contexts for language use. It is important to note here that “community,’ as a term, can be problematic. While it can seem to refer to a static, welldefined or a priori delimited group of people, including in ACTFL’s documentation, this approach would be reductionist. Community may very well designate a social aggregate but it should be envisioned as a dynamic construct, in other words, as the very process of this aggregation and in the actions that individuals take to develop, sustain, and nurture forms of sociality and solidarity that are recognizable and, to a large degree, shared (see, for example, Latour, 2005; Thorne, 2011). It is this view of community as both social process and outcome that we adopt here.

Further developments in theorizing the spatialization of language use followed, marked perhaps most notably by two seminal publications in 2003: Scollon and Scollon’s Discourses in Place and Block’s The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition. As reflected in the title, Scollon and Scollon (2003) presented a systematic approach for analyzing how language derives meaning from its placement in the material world. Calling this approach “geosemiotics,” Scollon and Scollon (2003) highlight the inseparability of social meaning from the material locatedness of language and discourse. For language practitioners, then, geosemiotics represented another reminder that context, that is, the social and material situation in which language is used, is a fundamental component of the meaning-making process. The situatedness of meaning also lies at the heart of Block’s (2003) critical re-evaluation of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), in which he interrogates the absence of socially informed approaches to language use in standard input-interaction-output models of SLA. While Block (2003) considers a range of social variables that play a role in mediating language use, central to his analysis is the need to move away from viewing language use as an isolated, individual process and to recognize language use as contextually situated.

More recent developments in language studies that have extended the profession’s attention to the centrality of context, environment, and the material world for meaning-making have focused on the ecology and socio-materialism of language use. A fundamental premise of ecological approaches to language learning and use (e.g., van Lier, 2004; Levine, 2020) is the close inter-relationships between language users and the environments around them. Van Lier (2000) himself refers to these environments as affording a “semiotic budget, which provides opportunities for meaningful actions in different situations” (p. 252). In their transdisciplinary framework, the Douglas Fir Group (2016) reaffirms the need to view language use from an ecological perspective that takes into account micro-level social activities, meso-level sociocultural institutions, and macro-level society-wide ideological structures. Sociomaterialism continues this emphasis on the centrality of social and physical environments for understanding human interaction and communication by illuminating the entangled relationships, the semiotic assemblages of humans, artifacts, and environments, and the emergent, process-based nature of the social realm that characterizes human action (Thorne et al., 2021).

Notions of space and the spatialization of human interaction and communication have unsurprisingly also been a major focus of Linguistic Landscape (LL) Studies. From its very early iterations (e.g., Landry & Bourhis, 1997), LL research has looked to analyze and understand language use in public space. Geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) and its emphasis on the inextricable relationship between the emplacement of public texts and their meaning continues to undergird LL methodology. More recent developments have also examined the perspectives of those public texts’ authors as well as of the citizens who interact with them as sources of meaning (Garvin, 2010; Huebner & Phoocharoensil, 2017; Lamarre, 2014). This emphasis on understanding the “human-sign interface” shifts the focus to exploring the different and very complex ways in which individuals perceive and engage with public signage in their everyday lives (Zabrodskaja & Milani, 2014, p. 2). Further

Introduction: Spatializing Language Studies in the Linguistic Landscape 7 facilitating the field’s understanding and analysis of space have been applications of Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space as consisting of conceived, perceived, and lived spaces (Gorter, 2018; Trumper-Hecht, 2010).

3 Spacing, Placing and Dislocating: Three Layers of Spatialized Teaching and Curricular Design

The chapters of this volume, in concert with the literature reviewed thus far in the introduction, reveal a number of significant ways in which spatialization is a productive lens through which language teachers can reimagine and reevaluate their courses, curricula, and lesson designs. As we suggested above, “spatialization” refers in a general sense to language educators’ actions and initiatives that make reasoned use of the ways in which language, people, and place co-construct each other through discursive practice. The notion of spatialization draws upon Leander and Sheehy’s (2004) insight that “space is not static—as in metaphorical images of borders, centers, and margins—it is dynamically relational” (p. 1). In this case, the dynamic relations of interest are those between language learners and other participants in local meaning-making processes, whether they be human or non-human, material or virtual. Spatialization, as in Canagarajah’s (2018) model of a spatial (rather than a cognitivist) orientation to competence, prioritizes how languaging activities “are aligned with other semiotic resources, social networks, and material features that account for the success of communicative activities” (p. 38). Language teachers seeking to capitalize on this pedagogical approach focus not on perfunctory communication per se but how to facilitate students’ participation in communicative activities as they are situated in (and co-constructive of) material, social, geographic, and historical contexts.

In order to make this general orientation toward spatialization more concretely actionable, we propose the following three-layered framework for teachers and curriculum designers to consider:

e Spacing is the configuring of learners, instructors, extra-institutional participants (e.g., community members), physical and virtual environments, technologies, and interactional purposes into various alignments with expected affordances and constraints for language learning and use. At a fundamental level, Spacing suggests a teacher’s involvement in understanding and manipulating the respective merits and limitations of “in-class” or “‘out-of-class,” and “virtual,” “‘inperson,” or hybrid settings for learning activities. We may also use Spacing as a way to draw together notions such as “community-based language learning,” “telecollaboration,” and “language learning in the wild,” for instance—terms that have distinct histories and practices associated with them, but which are alike in that they serve as overarching categories suggesting generally where and how learning activities take place, and make assumptions about participant roles and purposes that are distinct from traditional classroom-based language learning.

We wish to emphasize, too, that a teacher’s endeavors in this regard are not limited to the time before a school term or class session begins; Spacing is an iterative, even constant, aspect of teaching practice, in which regular adjustments and improvements are made to material, technological, and social conditions for learning.

e Placing is the gerund form of the transitive verb “to place.” As such, it highlights the agentive role that language instructors play in making intentional pedagogical use of the particular geographic, historic, cultural, political and material/virtual places in which language learning takes place. However, more than simply representing places as background illustrations to adorn the pages of a language textbook, or touristic playgrounds for a study abroad experience, Placing recognizes the ways in which intersecting senses of community, memory, and imagination inhere in locales that may be as vast as a region’s territory, or as focused as a street corner. In this sense, Placing engages the human and cultural geographic notion of “place” as a site for the accrual of meaning: in the words of Tuan (1977, p. 6), “if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.” A study abroad program that not only teaches its students about the host country and town but involves them meaningfully in activities with members of the local population, while asking them to interpret and reflect on the particularity of their experiences is one example of Placing in teaching practice.

e Dislocating is our term for the third layer in a spatialized language pedagogy. While it may carry unpleasant connotations for those who have experienced physical dislocations (of joints, or of oneself), in a metaphorical sense “‘dislocation” points to a profound aspect of second language and culture learning, in which encounters with the unfamiliar give rise to the potential for novel meanings and new identities. As Kramsch writes, “in the early stages of second language acquisition, especially as it occurs in classrooms or in settings far removed from communities of native speakers, signs are dislocated from their natural context of occurrence. The referential relation between signs and their objects is not (yet) perceived as natural and necessary, and the symbolic possibilities of the sign are much more evident than at later stages” (Kramsch, 2009, p. 13). In the linguistic landscape, of course, it is not just signs that are dislocated from their ‘natural context of occurrence, but language learners themselves. Whether immersed in the sights and sounds of a far-away town or a long-familiar neighborhood, students may be tasked “to become aware of linguistic forms and begin to think deeply about what cultural meanings and social identities are being enacted through these forms” (Sayer, 2020, p. 332). Among other functions it performs, this task of understanding sociocultural meanings in the unique places, times, and contexts of the linguistic landscape—and through a language with which one is less familiar—can productively dislocate students, bringing moments of insight and self-awareness through unfamiliar encounters and different frames of reference. To be sure, Dislocating will not happen of its own