The LoCALL App is an educational resource that invites users to “read” and explore Linguistic landscapes in a city, while playing a multiple-choice question game. Linguistic Landscapes are visible signs of multilingualism that pervade our everyday lives. They include public and commercial shop signs, street and place names, and advertising billboards, but also images, colors, sounds and smells in the physical surroundings. Research conducted in the school context shows that effectively exploring LL can contribute to language learning, foster multimodal learning experiences and text-to-world connections, and help students (and teachers) develop critical thinking, while engaging in meaningful conversations about their own identities.
Using a web platform, students and teachers create routes with several points of interest associated with Linguistic landscapes of their city, build questions about these points of interest, as well as to add answer options and feedback. Using the App that runs on a mobile device, users can play the games created for a given route. LoCALL: LOcal Linguistic Landscapes for global language education in the school context” is an Erasmus Plus project, financially supported between 1.09.2019 and 31.08.2022.