University Exchange Students’ Practices of Learning Finnish : A Language Ecological Approach to Affordances in Linguistic Landscapes

Abstract

In linguistic landscape (LL) studies, various projects have demonstrated how language learners benefit from tasks that involve the documentation and interpretation of the LL. In this chapter, we investigate how Finnish as a second language learner exchange students turned the local LL into affordances during their time abroad in Finland.

While language awareness and its relation to learning and teaching have been extensively discussed, it has often been regarded as a property of an individual consciousness: a faculty or a tendency of a particular person to perceive, notice and reflect upon the linguistic features present in their environments. In contrast, we argue for an approach that contests the person vs. environment dualism and frames language awareness in terms of relational processes. Using awareness raising tasks in second language pedagogy may help learners not only to notice what is useful in their environments, but at the same time invites them to reflect on how they can make use of such resources.

Based on the analysis of our corpus we argue that the students explored the role of the LL in their learning and thus, implicitly, also displayed elements of an ecological model of distributed cognition which we discuss in detail.