The Handbook of Informal Language Learning

16Linguistic Landscapes and Additional Language Development

JANA ROOS AND HOWARD NICHOLAS

Introduction

For growing numbers of language learners, contact with a target language outside formal educational institutions has increased in recent years, mostly as a result of globalization and the associated expanded access to the internet or other technological advances. While these opportunities are most obvious for the major economic languages of the world, and English in particular, the opportunities are not restricted to these languages. One readily available opportunity for language learners to make non‐institutionalized contact with the target language is the linguistic landscape of the environment outside the learners' classrooms, an opportunity especially prominent for learners of English. This non‐institutionalized contact with these languages can result in various opportunities to engage with different interpretations of linguistic, social, and ideological uses of communicative resources that are different from, but have the potential to complement and reshape, traditional classroom‐based approaches to additional language learning.

Taking advantage of these opportunities requires both learners and teachers to make connections between the multiple layerings in their informal experiences with one or more languages outside the classroom and the formal reflective/analytic affordances of the classroom. Clarifying how to make use of the opportunities embedded in these informal ...