Steve Daniel Przymus Abstract

Steve Daniel Przymus Abstract

 

Steve Daniel Przymus
  Ph.D. Candidate
  Second Language Acquisition & Teaching, GIDP

   The 7th International Linguistic Landscape Workshop
   Berkeley, California
   May 7-9, 2015

 A Tale of Two Tucsons: The Language of Street Signs and Classroom Instruction

Professional Abstract

Lay Audience Abstract

 

ABSTRACT

Two rallying cries occupy the public education discourse on classroom language ofinstruction in Tucson, Arizona: English for the Children (Arizona Proposition 203) and Bilingualism for the Children (Combs et al., 2005)This multimodal analysis demonstrates how street signs in this borderland city of the American Southwest subconsciously influence language ideologies and policy regarding when the Spanish language is privileged or prohibited. A comprehensive corpus analysis of more than 700 street signs in two disparate parts of Tucson and a focused analysis of the street signs in the vicinity of two elementary schools, on the one hand reveals how the dominance of English language and U.S. state street signs surrounding a school in the predominantly Hispanic and bilingual south of Tucson justifies the English only policy in that school and on the other hand how the overwhelming use of Spanish language street signs surrounding a school in the largely Anglo and monolingual English speaking Catalina Foothills, supports the ideology of bilingualism as a resource and that school’s dual language program. I diachronically and synchronically expose myths regarding street sign language in the two parts of Tucson and conclude with how street signs enter our cognition syntagmatically, paradigmatically, and as metonyms and conceptual metaphors.

 

Abstract (for Lay Audience)

This presentation highlights the subliminal power of street signs and how they have historically and continue today to influence language, race, and education ideologies and power structures in Tucson, Arizona. A detailed analysis of over 750 street signs in the predominantly Hispanic South of Tucson and the primarily Anglo Catalina Foothills demonstrates a surprising and stark imbalance in the degree of freedom to use the Spanish language on street signs. This kind of work furthers the knowledge in the fields of education and applied linguistics by demonstrating how street sign language influences different classroom language of instruction policies in the two parts of Tucson. Pictures will show how this curious narrative is published daily in our linguistic landscape.