Research Line Overview |
Community Literacies in Second Language Spaces was the first research line we established at LSLP, with our first research project in 2013. Along with our Gaming and Digital Literacies line, this is the place where our undergraduate researchers usually begin their research journeys. However, we have researchers who remain as part of #TeamCaL as they are now teachers.
Through this line of inquiry, we wish to explore how English (and other languages) appear in the city. We are interested in discovering how people are already using English and other second languages in the different communities that make part of our urban (and rural) spaces, keeping in mind the linguistic, semiotic, and aesthetic dimensions of literacy practices. Research in this line will describe and analyze how people are appropriating second languages in urban spaces of the city and how that appropriation translates to rural spaces. This line of work has also given us one of our two main concepts to date: City as Literacy. At present, our Urban Literacies quasi-longitudinal study (spanning three phases since 2013) has moved from the physical (Phase One) to cultural (Phase Two) to the collective community (Phase Three) and now the hybrid spaces (Phase Four). We view all this spaces as a sort of kaleidoscope that helps us see how Medellín (and eventually, other cities) grow as plurilingual cities. |
Our Conceptual Framework:
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The City as Literacy was our first original concept at LSLP, first shared at different local and international events since 2013. The concept itself has evolved as we have designed the different phases of our study and is the basis for the "Revisiting Space" part of our vision. However, our understanding of the framework has remained constant from the outset. Let us share an excerpt from a Micro-Paper by former LSLP Researchers Ana María Herrera and Sara Jaramillo that illustrates the framework:
The concept of City as Literacy explores more deeply the relationship between urban spaces and literacy practices. Drawing from literacy and ethnographic studies between the 1960s and 1980s, we propose a concept that begins by reformulating how we see the city. We argue that the city (in its condition of nonhuman) redefines the traditional concepts of reading and writing providing new forms of communication and The concept itself builds from the New Literacies Studies and linguistic landscaping traditions and incorporates other concepts to support it, such as multimodality, polylanguaging, metrolingualism, superdiversity, geosemiotics, translanguaging, and most recently, third-space. (You can find working definitions for all of these concepts in our LSLP Micro-Papers). This framework has already been used in a research project in Russia and we look forward to other scholars around the world using it for their own research.
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A Multi-Phase,
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We did not envision this research line to become a longitudinal study. We arrived at that decision after a closer look at the data and how the data not only showed us practices, but afforded us the chance to look back at data from previous phases over the years to look at the overall evolution of the city.
As it stands today, this research line has developed four research studies, each conceived as a phase of the larger study (click on the links below to learn about each of them) |
Research in Progress |