Language Socialization Through a Linguistic Landscape Lens

Language socialization (LS) is the process by which individuals engage in the social world using language and get introduced to society’s cultural practices. In school environments, this involves curricular language learning and students’ participation in extra-curricular activities regulated by school norms (e.g., school breaks, religious routines, etc.). The recent educational turn in linguistic landscape (LL) studies has shed light on various aspects of the “schoolscape,” suggesting the use of the LL to raise visibility of children’s diverse sociolinguistic repertoires. This study explores how monolingual/bilingual students in a Greek public elementary school get socialized through dominant language use and cultural practices. Specifically, we focus on the dynamics of the performed schoolscape, produced within the classroom and during the daily state-induced prayer, applying linguistic ethnography. Drawing on seventy-five hours of field notes (FN) recorded in a rural elementary school between February and March 2023, our key findings reveal aspects of classroom discourse, focusing on teachers’ voices and an unfolding power game, that together shape students’ LS. Specifically, school-based LS is performed in the form of: (a) classroom norms compliance; (b) a power game drawing on excellence discourse; (c) embodied cultural norms compliance; (d) grammar error correction; (e) socio-spatial arrangements beyond the verbal; and (f) sharing repertoires in research-initiated safe translanguaging spaces (language portraits). We conclude that the Greek schoolscape remains a socio-spatial process of selective or exclusive inclusion, and school-based language socialization, foregrounding the dominant Greek language and established cultural elements, is construed as a suppressive process that perpetuates bilingual students’ invisibility.