Exploring migrant Linguistic Landscapes through multilingual school texts

This article presents the findings of the PRISMA project, a multilingual writing initiative implemented in Italian public schools that adopt a multilingual pedagogical framework. The initiative involved students aged 11 to 14 to produce original texts recounting real migration stories using their full linguistic repertoires and a wide range of semiotic resources. Drawing on a corpus of 109 student-authored texts, the study explores how migration is narrated. The analysis develops across three complementary dimensions: the textual morphologies and multimodal layouts employed by students, the multilingual and translingual practices activated in their writing, and the multisensory representations of migratory experiences. The results demonstrate that these texts do not merely describe migration as movement through space, they act it as an embodied, emotional, and semiotic experience. Each text is approached both as a linguistic landscape and as a dynamic site where migrant landscapes are constructed and performed. The study proposes a theoretical and methodological expansion of linguistic landscape studies by extending the notion of landscape beyond static urban signage to include narrative and textual spaces. Furthermore, it introduces the concept of migrant landscapes evoked through student narratives. By doing so, the article contributes to current debates in applied linguistics and education, highlighting the potential of multilingual writing pedagogies to serve as both a tool for critical literacy and a lens through which to observe migration as a lived and narrated experience.