Fostering critical multilingual language awareness with teacher candidates in Türkiye through linguistic landscape projects

This study examines how engagement with linguistic landscapes (LL) can foster critical multilingual language awareness (CMLA) among English language teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye. Grounded in a critical perspective, we adopted indexical ordering as a theoretical lens and analytical framework to analyze how TCs’ second-order indexicality evidenced developing CMLA. Data comprised 25 LL projects (collected images and written analysis) from undergraduates in a sociolinguistics course. Thematic analysis yielded three themes: (1) understanding local–global linguistic relationships; (2) adopting situated perspectives through analyses of familiar locations; and (3) recognizing how diverse linguistic practices promote inclusion or reproduce barriers in multilingual spaces. Findings show that LL projects enabled TCs to critically examine ideological hierarchies, power dynamics, and social functions of multilingual signage. We discuss these insights through a heuristic of Relational Critical Topography. The study contributes to the limited scholarship on leveraging LLs to develop CMLA in EFL teacher education. • LLs are useful pedagogical tools to foster CMLA in English language teacher education. • LLs support TCs' noticing of ideologies, power dynamics and social functions of language. • Indexical ordering can be leveraged as a tool for understanding TCs' LL analyses. • Relational Critical Topography offers a sense-making heuristic to understand TCs' LL analyses.