Linguistic Landscape as a Resource in EGAP Courses: A Case Study

This article explores the incorporation of linguistic landscape (LL) studies into English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP) courses, emphasizing its potential to enhance language learning through real-world engagement. This study highlights the growing interest in LL as a sociolinguistic phenomenon that reflects urban multilingualism and cultural dynamics. The goal of this article is to analyze pedagogical benefits of integrating LL into language education, such as fostering critical thinking, pragmatic competence, intercultural awareness among students, and creating situations in which the target language is used in natural communication. Through a case study conducted at the Guangdong Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, the author presents specific classroom activities and reports on how they can be combined with fieldwork conducted by students. The goal of the tasks was to let students analyze language use in public spaces, classifying the surrounding signs into top-down and bottom-up, and informative and regulatory, and discuss how social prestige of languages is reflected in multilingual signs. In documenting written language in public places, creating their own signs and assessing their peers’ work, students were practicing both receptive and productive skills. Most of the work was done in small groups, which contributed to the students’ ability to collaborate with peers. The findings suggest that LL projects can effectively bridge classroom learning with lived language experiences, although challenges remain in implementation due to time constraints and pedagogical ideologies.