Abstract
The modern work life is interactionally challenging. For many, work consists of short-term projects executed in transient team combinations. An increasing number of work communities operate in multilingual environments, and many professionals conduct their work in a language which is not their first or strongest. The flux of interactional and linguistic settings in workplaces requires communication practises that acknowledge the difference in the participants’ language skills. In this paper, we explore such practises in a Finnish non-governmental organisation, using Conversation Analysis as our method. We focus on instances in which the professionals explicitly orient to their own or their co-participants’ role as language learners during workplace meetings. The paper aims to determine how this topicalisation is performed and what consequences it has for the construction of the (professional) identity of the second language speaker. The data consist of approximately 40 h of video-recorded meetings with Finnish, Russian and English as the main languages. The analysis reveals that instances where the language learner role is oriented to are usually related to practical questions of choosing the language for the meeting or a sufficiency of linguistic resources to conduct professional activities, yet they can also be used as means to construct one’s professional identity. These instances share certain features, such as prior topicalisation of language issues and the use of contextualisation cues that can help to soften the potentially problematic nature of referring to the (co-participant’s) limitations. The article contributes to our understanding of how to support participation and professional language learning in transient work settings.
Appendix 1: Transcription symbols
- [ ]
-
point of onset and offset of overlapping talk
- =
-
latching between utterances
- (1.5)
-
silence measured in seconds
- (.)
-
micro pause (less than 0.2 seconds)
- .
-
falling intonation
- ;
-
slightly falling intonation
- ?
-
rising intonation
- ,
-
level intonation
- word
-
stress or emphasis of the underlined sounds
- °word°
-
markedly quieter than the surrounding talk
- WORD
-
markedly louder than the surrounding talk
- ↑↓
-
marked shift into higher or lower pitch
- <word>
-
slower speech rate than surrounding talk
- >word<
-
faster speech rate than surrounding talk
- wo:rd
-
stretching of the preceding sound
- wo-
-
cut-off of the preceding word
- #word#
-
creaky voice
- £word£
-
smiling voice
- @word@
-
changed voice quality
- (())
-
transcriber’s comments
- (word - - )
-
unclear fragment of talk
- .hh
-
inhalation
- hh
-
exhalation
- PRT
-
particle
- *
-
moment of the embodied action
-
(described underneath the lines representing spoken interaction)
- +
-
moment illustrated in the figure
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Workplace communication in flux: from discrete languages, text genres and conversations to complex communicative situations
- Orienting to the language learner role in multilingual workplace meetings
- Negotiating belonging in multilingual work environments: church professionals’ engagement with migrants
- Changing participation in web conferencing: the shared computer screen as an online sales interaction resource
- Policing language in the world of new work: the commodification of workplace communication in organizational consulting
- “It’s not the same thing as last time I wrote a report”: Digital text sharing in changing organizations
- Regular Articles
- “It sounds like elves talking” – Polish migrants in Aberystwyth (Wales) and their impressions of the Welsh language
- Exploring lexical bundles in low proficiency level L2 learners’ English writing: an ETS corpus study
- Kingdom of heaven versus nirvana: a comparative study of conceptual metaphors for Christian and Buddhist ideals of life
- Linguistic multi-competence in the community: the case of a Japanese plural suffix -tachi for individuation
- Accent or not? Language attitudes towards regional variation in British Sign Language
- Validating young learners’ plurilingual repertoires as legitimate linguistic and cultural resources in the EFL classroom
- A corpus-based study of LGBT-related news discourse in Thailand’s and international English-language newspapers
- Academic emotions in giving genre-based peer feedback: an emotional intelligence perspective
- Detecting concealed language knowledge via response times
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Workplace communication in flux: from discrete languages, text genres and conversations to complex communicative situations
- Orienting to the language learner role in multilingual workplace meetings
- Negotiating belonging in multilingual work environments: church professionals’ engagement with migrants
- Changing participation in web conferencing: the shared computer screen as an online sales interaction resource
- Policing language in the world of new work: the commodification of workplace communication in organizational consulting
- “It’s not the same thing as last time I wrote a report”: Digital text sharing in changing organizations
- Regular Articles
- “It sounds like elves talking” – Polish migrants in Aberystwyth (Wales) and their impressions of the Welsh language
- Exploring lexical bundles in low proficiency level L2 learners’ English writing: an ETS corpus study
- Kingdom of heaven versus nirvana: a comparative study of conceptual metaphors for Christian and Buddhist ideals of life
- Linguistic multi-competence in the community: the case of a Japanese plural suffix -tachi for individuation
- Accent or not? Language attitudes towards regional variation in British Sign Language
- Validating young learners’ plurilingual repertoires as legitimate linguistic and cultural resources in the EFL classroom
- A corpus-based study of LGBT-related news discourse in Thailand’s and international English-language newspapers
- Academic emotions in giving genre-based peer feedback: an emotional intelligence perspective
- Detecting concealed language knowledge via response times