Learning english by walking down the street

With internationalization and globalization, English has proliferated in urban spaces around the world. This creates new opportunities for EFL learning and teaching. An English literacy walk is one activity that can be used productively to capitalize on this potential. The activity has roots in long-established approaches to emergent literacy education for young children and pedagogic projects inspired by recent research on linguistic landscapes. Drawing on these traditions, teachers can target reading outcomes involving code, semantic, pragmatic, and critical knowledge and skills. We use the four resources model of literate practices to systematically map some of the potential of literacy walks in multilingual, multimodal linguistic landscapes. We suggest tasks and teacher questions that might be used for the explicit teaching of reading during and after literacy walks. Although grounded in Taipei, our ideas might be of interest to EFL teachers in other globalized cities around the world.