Language as verbal art more than “a message for its own sake”

In this chapter, we transpose Miller’s (2017a, 2021) concept and understanding of “language as verbal art” to present the position that “language is verbal art”. Miller (ibid.) extends Hasan’s insistence that artistic value and interpretation of literature should centre around “how language functions in the text” and is rooted to the context of that text (Hasan 1989, p. 91). Miller regularly refers to literature as verbal art (Miller 2013, 2016b, 2017a, 2021) and in the present study, we refer to art as realised through languages (many different languages) and meanings that symbolically represent a communities’ understanding of “friendship”. We discuss language as art, as a “lasting”, “symbolical”, “generalisation” (Miller 2013, p. 125) realised through a co-created large mural (approximately 90 squared metres) that represents “friendship” in multiple languages, as shown in Figure 1. The “aesthetic intention” of the mural is to represent the “nature of human existence” friendship in a range of different languages (Miller 2017a, p. 512). The focus on the friendship mural (the text) highlights the importance of focusing on the message “for its own sake” (Jakobson 1960, p. 356, cited in Miller 2017a, p. 506, italics original) and how a text makes meaning in context. The text involves celebrating multilingualism with teachers, children, and parents at an inner-city school in the Southwest of England. At the school over 90% of the students are English as Additional Language (EAL) learners, i.e., their home language is a language other than English. In 2020, there were over 1.6 million learners recorded as using EAL in England, which constitutes just under one-in-five (19.5%) of all pupils aged between 5 to 16 years old (Strand 2021, p. 70). UNESCO (2022) highlight that a child’s home language plays a crucial role in shaping their learning outcomes and academic performance. Acknowledging, including, and building on home languages affords opportunities for multilingualism and translanguaging to enhance educational achievements (Harman 2018). Multilingualism refers to how individuals may use more than one language to communicate, while translanguaging occurs when an individual draws from one language to convey meaning in another. Translanguaging has often been resisted in educational settings, and the benefits of translanguaging are yet to be fully explored or understood in classroom contexts (Harman 2018).