The Linguistic Landscape in the English Language Classroom

Mara Luisa Simn, Spain

Mara Luisa Simn graduated in Translation and Interpreting English, French and German
from Comillas Pontifical University (Madrid, Spain) where she also did a Masters Degree in
Teaching English in Secondary and Upper-Secondary Education. She has also done professional
development programmes at University of Oxford (Oxford, UK), Norwich Institute for Language
Education (Norwich, UK) and Georgetown University (Washington D.C., USA) and has taken
part in TESOL-Spain conventions. She has been working as an English sworn translator for five
years and as an English and French teacher in Secondary and Upper-Secondary Education in a
Marist school in Spain since 2011. She started last year a Ph.D. in Modern Languages at
Universidad de Alcal (Madrid, Spain) and her main areas of interest are education, lexicology,
and translation. Mara Luisa is also a member of the Spanish Society for Applied Linguistics.
E-mail: marylouisesimonnieto@gmail.com

Menu
Introduction
Literature Review: Contact between the English and the Peninsular Spanish
English project
Conclusion
References

Introduction
The aim of this article is to provide teachers and teacher trainers with a new educational
approach based on the linguistic landscape. I will therefore present a new framework for students
that differentiate intercultural and intracultural uses. Sometimes, we forget that not only must we
teach a new code, but other cultural aspects linked to the language itself. Otherwise, our effort
will be to no avail. Without a shadow of a doubt, a language will not be properly learned if we do
not get immersed in the values and different ways of thinking adhered to that culture. Another
factor which should be added to this point is the importance of asking ourselves: Does teaching
help and encourage students to learn in ways that make a sustained, substantial and positive
difference in the way we think, act, or feel without doing them major harm? This enquiry can be
divided into four subquestions:
1.
2.
3.
4.

Is the material worth learning and appropriate to the curriculum?

Are my students learning what the activity or project is supposedly teaching?
Am I helping and encouraging the students to learn or do they learn despite me?
Have I harmed my students perhaps fostering short-term learning with intimidation
tactics, discouraging rather than stimulating additional interest in the field, fostering
strategic or bulimic rather than deep learning, neglecting the needs of a diverse student
population, or failing to evaluate students learning accurately?

It goes without saying, the teacher must deep into an extensive examination of their learning
objectives to answer all these questions. Try as they might, an educator will not do their best
unless they promote an integrated education rather than one fragmented between individual
features. Thus, the importance of analysing the language as a whole, thinking about innovative
ways people use the language in local contexts, and bringing it to the English classroom to
thoroughly research on the impact of English in the different societies. I will specifically focus
on the influence of English as a global language in Spain.

Literature review: Contact between the English and the Peninsular Spanish
In the light of the last research examined by linguists, we are going through a period of striking
cultural exchanges between Spain and other countries. As a corollary, the Spanish language
along with all modern languages is always evolving while being shaped by other languages,
mainly by English. Nonetheless, we cannot claim this is something which has just arisen, as the
Spanish stems from Latin had also a great influence of the Arabic language. In fact, from the 15th
to the 18th century, Spain was provided with many foreign terms, particularly from French in the
18th century due to the Bourbon dynasty. The French influence on Spanish continued through the
19th century until nowadays. Nevertheless, its impact today is not as prominent as in the past,
since in the 19th century, Britain emerged as a world power and began to exert a far-reaching
effect on the Spanish language as well as on other European languages and French stopped being
the main source of foreign loanwords.
Before the 18th century, English loanwords were very rare, but from the first half of the 19th
century, the English literature and the social and cultural life in Britain have had a far-marked
effect on the Spanish intellectuals. In the last quarter of the 19th century, the English impact was
enhanced thanks to the technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution, which helped
English adopt new terminology in areas such as transport, clothmaking and social life. The late
19th century and the early 20th century shed light on a wide range of anglicisms in very many
fields such as music, dance, drinks, dress, and particularly sports. Until the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939), Spain did not feel reluctant to the English influences, but from that moment on,
Spain underwent a prolonged critical period in terms of linguistics and political isolation in
which hardly any loanword permeated in the Spanish language until the early fifties, that is,
during the first stage of Francos dictatorship. Some years later, in the last quarter of the 20th
century, English started to be taught at schools.
After World War II, especially after 1950, English expanded drastically, as the American
military bases were installed in Rota and Torrejn de Ardoz (Madrid, Spain) according to Flix
Rodrguez Gonzlez (1999: 105). Until that moment, French had been the language of culture.
The direct influence of English on Spanish is considered a post-war event, as some years before,
the vast majority of anglicisms arrived in Spain through France. Some years afterwards, in the
sixties, tourism was conferred its own ministry, as the Spanish coasts were always crowded with
British tourists. At that time, the Spanish youngsters also started to travel to the British Isles.
This fact meant the beginning of significant cultural exchanges and more importantly, of new
changes in the Spanish language. The assumption and coinage of foreign words, and particularly

from English, loosely speaking, has conventionally clashed with the most purist linguists
notions. The first and most important Spanish Academician to skilfully handle the problem of
anglicisms was Emilio Lorenzo in his well-known book Anglicismos Hispnicos published in
1996. He provided a theoretical and practical framework in the Spanish context and began his
research given the need to examine the situation that Spain was experiencing in terms of English
influence, both on its linguistic aspect and social impact, while entailing the English lifestyle and
the Anglo-Saxon traditions. Spain has always feared being foreignised by means of the
Anglophone culture represented by the English culture, as it is the case with most cultures. This
is the reason why Roswitha Fischer (2008: 5) supports that anglicisms should be regarded as a
means of communication and not of identification. Nevertheless, many inhabitants do not see the
embedding of English words as a worthwhile means of communication, but rather as an attempt
to take over their national and cultural values. We can firmly appreciate this event through the
advertising media, and more recently, through the linguistic landscape, as shall be proved in this
doctoral thesis.
We cannot predict the evolution of a language, but the study of the linguistic landscape can help
us determine the process our language is encountering. Had the people from the Middle Ages
been said that Latin would stop being the language of education, nobody would have believed it,
so even though English has become a lingua franca nowadays, we cannot claim it will prevail in
this way forever. A week may be a long time in politics; but a century is a short time in
linguistics, as David Crystal (2014: 123) has recently claimed. Considering this, there are some
factors involved in language change such as the linguistic loyalty, the pride, the prestige, the
usefulness, the aversion, and other ones linked to the structure of the language in itself as
specified by Weinreich for the first time in 1953 and afterwards by Jos Luis Blas Arroyo (2012:
352). These aforementioned aspects, which make our society change, have led to a new concept
in terms of linguistics, that is, linguistic landscape. It was first introduced by Laundry and
Bourhis in 1997, who defined it as the language of public road signs, advertising billboards,
street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings
combine to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region or urban agglomeration.
In order to achieve a better understanding of the origin of linguistic landscape, we should
consider advertising as another field closely linked to linguistic landscape which has long played
a significant role in new foreign words in the Peninsular Spanish, since the 1980s, according to
Emilio Lorenzo and Chris Pratt (1980: 113). In the past, even though the Peninsular Spanish
language of advertising was inspired by English, anglicisms channelled by the English speakers
were not remarkable at all. However, not only has the advertising sector given a boost to the
coinage of anglicisms and loanwords, but also other fields such as technology, medicine,
tourism, science, fashion, economy, politics, sports, and the like. The breakthroughs of the media
in the twentieth century have socially paved the way for English more than French in the 18th and
19th centuries. More specifically, publicity has been crucial in reflecting societal attitudes. In
actual fact, there is a trend not to translate parts of the message in Spanish advertising. This fact
may be due to the simple command of English assumed by Spaniards, the need to persuade to
buy certain products, as well as the eminent state of affairs of the English language, among other
factors. Not surprisingly, the research on linguistic landscape has originated abroad as a need to
analyse the innovations in a language prompted by advertising as it will be shown in the
Literature Review. By the end of the 19th century, a blend of social and economic factors led to a

sharp increase in the use of advertisements in publications, especially in the most industrialized
countries. English in advertising started very early on, when the weekly newspapers began to
take items about books, medicines, tea, and other domestic products. Many of these products
which are now household names got a welcome boost in that century, such as Ford, Coca Cola,
Kodak and Kellogg. Correspondingly, posters, billboards, electric displays, shop signs and, other
strategies played an increasing role in the daily life. As international markets developed, the
outdoor media started to travel to the different continents, and their standing everywhere is now
one of the most remarkable global testimonies of the English language. According to David
Crystal (2014: 94), the number of English advertisements is not always higher in countries where
English has no special status, but they are usually the most noticeable. In view of this fact, the
official language of international advertising bodies, such as the European Association of
Advertising Agencies is, without fail, in English.
Irrespective of us being in one place or another one, language is everywhere and new terms
permeate the different languages. It is useful for thinking about the innovative ways people use
the language in local contexts. The modern urban landscape is covered with signs: naming stores
and streets, adorning T-shirts and backpacks, giving directions, peddling products, and
promoting politicians, just to name a few.

English project
When I started teaching English as a foreign language, I realised that students often miss very
many aspects of the real world they find on the streets after finishing lessons. As we have seen,
not only do advertising and media contain basic ingredients to study the evolution of a language,
but they play an instrumental part in the acquisition of a second language. Unfortunately,
practice outside the classrooms is finite. In order to undertake this task, I decided to choose a
group of students of First of Upper-Secondary Education, that is, 16-year-old students from
Spain.
First of all, I started the project with a leading question. I asked my students to wonder
themselves why they thought Spaniards used English in shops, restaurants, drugstores, and the
like. After that, they had to collect ten pictures of signs, billboards, banners, or posters in English
and arrange them to identify different categories. Students were asked to conduct their own
analysis, propose classifications depending on their provenance and make their own
interpretations. In order to do it, I suggested them searching for themes restaurants, churches,
shops, money exchange places, that would help them organise the pictures of the different
signs, banners, posters, and billboards. While doing it, they discovered the wide range of social
meanings of English in Spain. Interestingly, most of the banners, signs, posters, and billboards
were meant for intracultural consumption, that is, English was used as a way of communication
among Spaniards. Of all these photos, some of the texts incorporated a translation in Spanish.
Another significant point found by the students was the difference between the traditional and
the innovative use of English. According to their results, some of the social functions of English
are that:

- It is advanced and sophisticated.

- It is fashionable.
- It is sexy.
- It is also used for expressions of love.
After that, students had to reflect upon all the items they had previously identified and classify
them into nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, or articles. Consequently, they thought
about the different roles each term played. Then, students spared a thought on prefixes and
suffixes which may have been added to the new items and made a description as well as an
analysis of each picture considering the aforementioned aspects. Additionally, they had to reflect
upon lexical differences between borrowings and their source words: was there a semantic
reduction, a semantic narrowing, a semantic widening, an increase of loanword meanings, or
loan clippings? Last but not least, students were asked to speculate about potential reasons for
the deviation of meaning in loanwords and do research on their first and ultimate etymons.
Here are some of the pictures taken by them:

Conclusion
All in all, by doing this project, students create a link between the ideas and themes of the
English classroom and the real world. Secondly, using the linguistic landscape as an educational
tool, teenagers become more creative, analytical, and practical. They learn how a language is
used in the community and realise its different functions in terms of lexicology and
sociolinguistics. The students become linguist detectives, as they ask themselves the way and the
reasons why people use the language differently hinging on societal attitudes or targets. They
present their analysis and justify their interpretations. After making oral presentations in the
classroom, there is an animated discussion about what categories they can create to plan their
own linguistic landscape. Additionally, students are asked to do research on new linguistic

innovations and new borrowed words which make them widen their cultural linguistic horizons.
These are some of the latest tendencies found by students: sometimes, the Spanish spelling is
modified to make the message get an English tinge or, adopt an international approach. At other
times, there is a growing presence of very common terms in the whole advertising sector, mainly
in the sport domain and in the catering industry. In addition, the use of the Saxon genitive has
also been noticed in very many establishments by adding s to Spanish names.
Last but not least, seeking and searching realia is stimulating and motivating for students,
who are always on the lookout for knowledge, innovation, and creativity. It also enhances their
critical thinking when exploring the meanings of English and their autonomy by selecting and
discriminating one picture or another one for their research as well as their meanings. We can
therefore claim that the questions tackled in the introduction can be positively answered.
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