With ELLA—Ethnographic Linguistic Landscaping, Tilburg University’s team experimented with an approach that was quite different from class-based language learning. The students went out onto the streets where they can be found almost everyday, on their way to work, school or friends, and they collected semiotic materials that ‘raised questions’. Either by asking the people related to the semiotic materials, or by looking up information on the Internet, students got to know more about the socio-political history of the area, gained a better understanding of its superdiversity, learned to use the Internet to look up information, and finally wrote their findings down in Dutch. A multimodal approach indeed!
A workshop by Tilburg University, The Netherlands
