“If they could, they would put them on a drip with Dutch”: Language learning and the professional integration of migrants in Flanders

Sarah Van Hoof; Sara Nyssen; Sibo Kanobana

doi:10.1515/ijsl-2020-2094

Article

“If they could, they would put them on a drip with Dutch”: Language learning and the professional integration of migrants in Flanders

Sarah Van Hoof , Sara Nyssen and Sibo Kanobana

Published/Copyright: August 17, 2020

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From the journal International Journal of the Sociology of Language Volume 2020 Issue 264

Abstract

This contribution investigates the rationale and implementation of an employment policy that envisions the quick insertion of migrants in the labour market through short and intensive language learning. We present an ethnographic analysis of a short and intensive course of Dutch for migrant job seekers developed in the context of Flemish employment policy. Our data show that the policy is framed in a discourse of empowerment and efficiency, but in its implementation focuses strongly on surveillance, the punitive consequences of which are tacitly attenuated by the practitioners implementing it. The drive towards quick and efficient language learning could be seen to conflict with the unpredictable nature of language learning. A focus on short-term language learning and quick professionalisation trajectories moreover seems to push migrants into low-skilled, precarious employment and to have stratificational outcomes along gendered lines. While arguing for the need to raise awareness of the way gender intersects with issues of language learning and professional integration, this contribution also reflects on the limitations of language learning as a strategy for migrants’ empowerment and contends that an exclusive focus on language as the key to integration erases the structural factors that produce inequality on the labour market.

Keywords: second language learning; employment; migration; gender; integration

Corresponding author: Sarah Van Hoof, Ghent University, Gent, Belgium, E-mail: sarah.vanhoof@ugent.be

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the editors of this special issue, Kamilla Kraft and Mi-Cha Flubacher, for inviting us to contribute, and for their support and feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We are also grateful to Britt Roels and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All remaining shortcomings are our own.

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Published Online: 2020-08-17

Published in Print: 2020-08-27

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2020-2094

Keywords for this article

second language learning; employment; migration; gender; integration