Abstract
Is there such a thing as a monolingual city? That question drove the inquiry and analysis reported here of English as a language and semiotic resource in physical spaces in the city of Medellín, Colombia. Combining ethnographic methods with our conceptual framework of ‘city as literacy’, the authors spent 2 years exploring urban literacies stemming from the mixture of English language, multimodal texts and the city itself as a semiotic system. This chapter will discuss instances of creativity, indexicality and multimodal text design found as the researchers walked through restaurants, malls, bookshops, libraries and advertisements in diverse neighbourhoods across the city. This chapter will show a polylanguaged city where English coexists with the dominant language Spanish and where the intermingling of languages is not conflictual but engages with inhabitants’ cultural values. We will also discuss our concerns about using the city as a literacy learning site and developing aesthetic sensitivities about second languages through semiotic analysis.
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Acknowledgement
This paper is an extended version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago, IL, in April 2015. Data used for this paper belongs to the research project ‘English Literacy Practices in the Urbs of “Medellín City”’, funded by the Center for Research, Development and Innovation (CIDI) at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Sede Central Medellín (filed under code 047B-02/13-S80).
Special thanks go to two previous team members, Melissa Castaño and Nathalie Gómez. They were the first students who joined the project, and their commitment was instrumental to our success. Additional thanks to Tatiana Chiquito and Maryori Giraldo, who read this paper and offered suggestions for improvement. We also hope that this chapter will serve as proof that ‘dreaming big today’ is the way to go in research and life.
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Mora, R.A., Pulgarín, C., Ramírez, N., Mejía-Vélez, M.C. (2018). English Literacies in Medellín: The City as Literacy. In: Nichols, S., Dobson, S. (eds) Learning Cities. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 8. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8100-2_4
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