Visual Methods in Researching Language Practices and Language Learning: Looking at, Seeing, and Designing Language

Abstract

The changing ways of using language and various understandings of what language is have consequences for the way we research language practices and language learning. When engaging in social contact, people use diverse and complex forms, modes, and varieties of language to communicate, and moreover, these resources often include icons, images, and other semiotic ways of meaning making. Visuality thus has a natural position in people’s language practices. In this chapter, we discuss how visual methods have been adopted and used as a methodological tool in researching language practices and language learning. With this focus, attention is geared to the materiality of language, on the one hand, and to the alternative and complementary strategies to study experiences and meaning making of language users and learners, on the other. In presenting the major contributions and work in progress from this perspective, we focus on discourse ethnographic approaches in the contexts of language learning, multilingualism, and identity negotiations, and we have structured our text around the visual research strategies of looking, seeing, and designing.