Learning Schoolscapes in a Minority Setting

Abstract

Abstract In my paper, I present a qualitative approach to the linguistic landscape of Hungarian schools in Sepsiszentgyörgy/Sfântu Gheorghe, Romania. These landscapes are called schoolscapes as they represent the material environment where texts and images “constitute, reproduce and transform language ideologies” (Brown 2012: 282). These manifestations reveal a lot about language learning and teaching in a formal educational environment. Beyond the simple representations of languages in education, we may trace more or less hidden curriculum details of foreign- and second-language teaching (English/German, Romanian) in a Hungarian-Romanian dominant bilingual setting. My aim is to describe the visual manifestations of the differences and similarities between the languages taught to minority children and the mutual efforts of teachers and students to meet the basic challenges of learning and teaching these languages.