Agenda

Understanding health and nutrition issues in Indonesian urban school environments: a linguistic landscape analysis

Professor Lesley Harbon
University of Technology Sydney

Ingresso libero fino a esaurimento posti

In Indonesia’s schools landscapes, messages regarding food and nutrition abound, and as for societies anywhere planning for the wellbeing of their citizens into the future, it is important that healthy food messages are aplenty for good eating habits to eventually form over people’s lifetimes. The study reported here, undertaken by the presenter and colleague, Dr Sisilia Halimi, at the University of Indonesia, aimed to evaluate those notions by examining the nature and scope of the linguistic landscape of selected Indonesian primary schools. The study involved twenty primary schools perimeters and specifically analysed the landscapes by digitally gathering food/nutrition signs/texts  to determine the kinds of languages and messages represented in particular places. The study also explored other non-food images relating to health found in these school landscapes. Data were analysed using open and axial coding. The study revealed that the majority of the texts and images were in Bahasa Indonesia, the national official language of Indonesia, and only a small percentage written in Sundanese, Arabic, Japanese and English. Texts relating to food and nutrition were found both inside and outside the school environments. Each language was indicated to be responsible for particular types of messages. The conclusion reports a ‘disjunct’ (Harbon & Halimi, 2019) between the overtly health-oriented linguistic landscape within the school perimeter and the less healthy linguistic landscape outside, an issue which may be of concern to schools and their communities. The research findings have hopefully been important for the education authorities and for informing education policy. This project was funded by The Australia-Indonesia Centre.

Keywords: linguistic landscape, Indonesian primary school, language, photographic images

The Presenter - Professor Lesley Harbon is Head of School in the School of International Studies and Education at the University of Technology Sydney. Her 40 year professional career has seen her teach Indonesian and German language in primary and secondary schools, and then involved teacher education and higher degree research supervision. Her collaboration with Dr Sisilia Halimi continues with an edited volume of applied linguistic research appearing in 2020 through Routledge.