Presently, there is limited research examining communication challenges and language competencies among newcomers who work in places other than regulated professions such as nursing or engineering in smaller regional centres such as the Okanagan valley. With the goal of understanding newcomers’ spoken English language in use in regional workplace settings, this project sets out to explore a subset of data that have been collected from a larger national-level project, carried out in collaboration with Dr. Christine Doe (Mount Saint Vincent University) and Dr. Liying Cheng (Queen’s University), investigating how newcomers’ perceived challenges and competencies in immigrant workplace settings map onto descriptors of English language proficiency. For the current project, data from the local research site in British Columbia, in the form of semi-structured interviews exploring participants’ self-assessed English language proficiency and stories of using English in the workplace (n=15), are disaggregated from the national data to focus on local newcomer workplace language experiences in the Okanagan valley. Grounded in the UBC Language Sciences Initiative research strategy core theme of Language, Sustainability, and Transnationalism and influenced by a second language socialization understanding of additional language in use (Duff, 2007; Duff & Kobayashi, 2010), the inquiry draws from a variety of disciplines such as applied linguistics, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), anthropology, social work, settlement, education, and management to understand language in use in newcomer workplaces. Qualitative research methods are employed to categorize and code the disaggregated data to uncover emerging themes related to participants’ perceptions of their language in the workplace. Based on the findings, implications related to English language teaching, learning, and assessment for newcomers from diverse linguistic backgrounds will be explored, with particular emphasis on instructional tasks that support language skills for the workplace while fostering newcomers’ own aspirational goals.
References
Duff, P. (2007). Second language socialization as sociocultural theory: Insights and issues. Language Teaching, 40(4), 309-319.
Duff, P. & Kobayashi, M. (2010). The intersection of social, cognitive, and cultural processes in language learning: A second language socialization approach. In R. Batstone (Ed.), Sociocognitive perspectives on language use and language learning (75-93). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.