Linguistic landscape, critical language awareness and critical thinking: promoting learner agency in discourses about language

There is now increased awareness of the need to challenge 'common sense' ideologies of language in education, turning language classrooms into spaces of analysis and liberation. Key to achieving this goal is equipping students with the skills needed to navigate diverse, complex discourses about language (critical thinking), as well as fostering an agentive disposition among them (critical language awareness).This article reports on research which examined how these qualities can be developed by involving language learners in analysis of public signs (linguistic landscape). 33 undergraduate students at a public university in Bhutan were recruited to participate in an extra-curricular activity in which they were asked to independently collect examples of public signs from the capital Thimphu and engage in guided analysis and discussion of the linguistic and visual features of the signs. Analysis of video recordings of learner interaction as well as of the textual data produced during and after the activity indicated that critical thinking processes were activated with relative regularity. In combination with pre- and post-activity interviews, these data also indicated that activating critical thinking through the activity also allowed several of the learners to take up a more agentive position in discourses about language in Bhutan.