Taking a multi-level perspective on language-in-public-space policy, this study investigates the way Tunisia's dominant languages are dealt with in three independent but interrelated activities of language policy: official texts, public talk, and the actual practices of business actors in five commercial districts in metropolitan Tunis. Detailed…

The identity of a city matters in a global age. This article explores the discursive construction of the global city's identity in relation to semiotic landscape, using the construction of Shanghai as a global city as a case study. In this increasingly globalising world, Shanghai authorities have recently demonstrated the desire to establish…

The Republic of Cyprus is a country characterised by a long-term conflict which resulted in the geopolitical division of the island. Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots have lived in separation for more than 30 years until the border re-opened in 2003, allowing people to cross and visit 'the other side'. One of the crossing points is located in…

Background: In South Africa, developing criticality among learners is essential for their careers in school and outside school. However, knowledge and understanding of critical literacy within the schooling context is unclear, with only patchy guidance available for teachers. Objectives: An intervention project was set up to discover how community…

Symbolic competence, "the ability to actively manipulate and shape one's environment on multiple scales of time and space" (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008, p. 667), offers researchers and educators the ability to understand how learners position themselves. This positioning involves a vying for semiotic resources as a means to question…

Linguistic landscape (LL) research seeks to account for the visible displays of multilingualism on public signage. While surveys of signage in the LL produce quantitative descriptions of language contact in a given area, such analyses shed little light on people's interpretations of multilingual signs. Moreover, even within more qualitative…

Essays in applied linguistics presented in this annual review include: "Learner Autonomy: Some Steps in the Evolution of Theory and Practice" (David Little); "An Investigation of the Mental Lexicon of Second Language Learners" (Elizabeth O'Gorman); "Strategies for Identifying Terms in Specialised Texts" (Jennifer Pearson); "Inferencing and the…