Band 14, Heft 4 - Special Issue: Workplace communication in flux; Guest Editors: Mona Blåsjö, Riikka Nissi and Carla Jonsson

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.

The study presented in this paper focuses on three evangelical churches in Sweden and their engagement with migrants. The goal of the study is to explore how professionals engage with migrants in their everyday work in a multilingual environment. To this end, data from interviews with church professionals are triangulated with video-recordings of their interaction with migrants in a variety of church settings. The analyses demonstrate how different dimensions of belonging are enacted in multilingual encounters through practices that allow the professionals to perform social work in an activity context where empathy is of great importance. These findings highlight the role of the church within the public sphere under the changing conditions of globalization.

This article explores the increasing digitalization of workplace communication. Drawing on the material environment in a complex, technology-mediated workplace environment, the article investigates how remote sales interaction is constructed and managed by its participants. The data consist of web conferences conducted in Finland between a salesperson (SP) and a prospective customer (C). During the meeting, SP delivers a software solution demonstration on a shared computer screen on which only SP is able to take actions. Deploying the method of multimodal conversation analysis, the research focuses on how the shared computer screen is used as an interactional resource to achieve joint attention and to direct participants’ focus during the sales meeting. First, the shared screen view is SP’s resource; for instance, when SP describes the functionalities of the software, he/she recurrently uses deictic expressions and other linguistic means in combination with coordinated keyboard activity. Later, the shared screen view evolves into a medium for both participants’ actions. The findings suggest that, as the negotiation gets closer to the context of the customer organization’s business, C may use the screen as a vehicle for his/her own interactional purposes. Through a gradual growth in understanding of the software, C begins commenting on the screen view or guides SP’s actions on the shared screen, enabling both a collaborative sales interaction and knowledge construction in a complex technological environment. Unlike previous studies on technology-supported institutional telephone interactions, SP’s screen view in the present study is a resource shared by both the professional and the client. The study contributes both to the field of technology-mediated workplace studies as well as to the field of sales and marketing research.

This paper examines how the shift to knowledge and innovation economy has created new sites for the commodification of language and communication in the context of organizational consulting. The data come from a consultant-led development and training program of the management teams of a Finnish educational organization. In the study, the year-long training was videotaped (45 h) and followed ethnographically. By using rhetorical discourse analysis as a method, we examine how the consultant-led training activities present the role of language and communication in changing working life. The results show how the activities factualize the transformation of work and the centrality of language in this transformation. They conceptualize language and communication as key elements of professional competence and resources for organizational improvement. Moreover, they construct causal relations between organizational success and the ability to assess and modify one’s own communicative behavior. With its focus on language awareness and contextual variation the training differs from settings examined in previous studies where the mechanisms of commodification are based on standardization practices. In conclusion, we reflect the training programs both as indicators and vehicles for social change and discuss how they act as spaces where the new worlds of work are discursively construed.

In the communications of modern organizations, text sharing and knowledge management are mainly digital. The digital systems that frame many types of communication consist of, e.g., intranets and document sharing software that are occasionally exchanged for new systems. Employees have to adjust to modified routines and learn new systems, and management has to make decisions about digital systems and how these are to be integrated with work processes and knowledge management. In this article, we contribute to research on work-life literacies by highlighting the increasingly frequent issue of digital text sharing in modern workplaces through the study of commercial companies, mainly through ethnographic observations and interviews. The theoretical framework comes from New Literacy Studies where literacy practices, i.e., common patterns of using reading and writing, form a key concept. Moreover, the sociolinguistic concept of metadiscourse is applied in order to uncover the reflexive orientation of participating professionals towards digital text sharing. The results show that these professionals relate the combination of digital text sharing and technological and organizational change to problems, obstacles and potential risks; ambitions of enhancing digital text sharing may exclude certain groups, and changes in digital text sharing systems per se may cause professionals to lose control. These risks are often associated with access to information: a person who cannot access information in their organization has a lower degree of agency or power over their situation. The results are discussed in light of theories concerning modern work life from New Literacy Studies.

The purpose of this paper was to gain a better understanding of the perceptions of the Welsh language held by the Polish adult migrants in Aberystwyth, Wales. Using qualitative research methods, we collected data from participants concerning their perceptions of the sound and spelling system of Welsh. Data obtained showed that adult Poles in Aberystwyth perceive the phonetics and phonotactics of Welsh to be markedly different from that of their native Polish. The participants believed Welsh to have small number of vowels and large number of consonantal clusters. By comparing consonantal and vowel inventories we were able to demonstrate that Welsh has a more complex vowel inventory than Polish. The consonantal inventories of both languages show great similarities and should not pose major problems to Polish learners of Welsh, who are also speakers of English. As for the phonotactics, Polish possesses a far more complex inventory of consonantal clusters than Welsh. We show that claims of the study’s participants that Welsh pronunciation is markedly different from Polish is not based on the linguistic grounds. Instead, such claims must be rooted in the social and ideological perceptions of the Welsh language on the part of the participants in the study.

The use of formulaic language in written discourse is an important indicator of language competence. Nonetheless, the features of lexical bundles used by lower proficiency English as a Foreign Language learners have received little attention. The present study addressed this gap by employing a corpus-based method to investigate the quantity, function, and quality of four-word lexical bundles produced by low proficiency L2 English writers with 11 different L1 backgrounds in response to a timed English writing assessment. The investigation was specifically anchored on the data extracted from 1,330 essays using Wordsmith 7.0. Results of the investigation showed (1) an over dependence on writing topic related bundles; (2) an Indo-European L1 language background positively influencing lexical bundle production; (3) an overuse of stance expressions and discourse organizers at the expense of referential expression usage; (4) L1 Japanese, Korean, and Telugu writers producing more accurate lexical bundles and L1 German writers producing fewer accurate lexical bundles; and (5) the frequent use of lexical bundles not leading to highly accurate and appropriate use of lexical bundles. The implications of these results were discussed in connection with foreign language education.

This paper adopts Conceptual Metaphor Theory to compare the Christian ideal of life, i.e. the kingdom of heaven and the Buddhist ideal of life, i.e. nirvana . Through a systematic investigation of the metaphorical expressions bearing the two concepts in the Book of Mathew and the Lotus Sutra , we find that they share the static metaphor ( the kingdom of heaven/nirvana is a container ), i.e. both religions envision the ideal state of life as entering a container. Dynamically, the kingdom of heaven is conceptualized as an upcoming event while nirvana as the destination of a journey . The two dynamic metaphors reveal four major differences. Firstly, the kingdom of heaven is described as arrival into and nirvana as departure from the mundane world. Secondly, the arrival of the kingdom of heaven aims to eliminate the sin of human beings while the departure for nirvana aims to leave behind bitterness of the mundane world. Thirdly, the kingdom of heaven emphasizes the dichotomy between the good and the evil while nirvana emphasizes delivering all living beings. Fourthly, God acts as a king and judge in the final judgement of the kingdom of heaven while Buddha acts as a guide in the journey to nirvana.

Applied linguists have investigated the nature of linguistic multi-competence (LMC) as a consequence of languages in contact in the minds of individuals and have observed that our first language is more amenable to change than once thought. However, LMC can manifest itself in not only an individual language user but also a linguistic community. This study explores the manifestation of LMC at the community level from historical and socio-cognitive perspectives with special focus on the use of a Japanese plural marker -tachi . It is a suffix usually attached to humans, but is frequently observed with animals and even inanimate nouns such as hon-tachi ‘books,’ which is conventionally considered unacceptable. This study analyzes over 100 -tachi cases collected from narrations and commentaries in public broadcasts. The analysis investigates the type of nouns to which -tachi is attached and the contexts where -tachi is used. The findings suggest that while retaining its original plural system, Japanese has accomplished the integration of a certain grammatical feature of English into Japanese. We argue that this innovative expressive means embedded in LMC as an integrated system in the community enables Japanese users, when necessary, to realize discrete objects, irrespective of whether they are living things or not, as individuated entities in the cognitive foreground with conceptually characteristic profiles.

British Sign Language (BSL) has been shown to have a high degree of regional variation especially at the lexical level. This study explores awareness and attitudes of the British deaf community towards this regional variation. We studied interview data from the BSL Corpus (http://bslcorpusproject.org/data) from 121 deaf, BSL signers from six regions across the UK including Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, London and Manchester, focusing on responses to five questions in relation to regional variation in BSL. Responses were analysed using thematic analysis, following (Braun, V. & V. Clark. 2006. Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology 3(2). 77–101. https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa). Findings reveal that BSL signers exhibited overall high levels of meta-linguistic awareness, as many of their attitudes and beliefs were in line with what has been reported in relation to linguistic behaviour with BSL such as mouthing, fingerspelling and accommodation. In addition, BSL signers seem to place enormous value on regional variation in BSL, believing that such variation contributes to the richness of BSL as a language and puts it on equal footing with the surrounding majority language, i.e. English. We explore the implications of these attitudes towards a broader understanding of language ideologies, including the concept of accent.

In the last decades, the applied linguistics literature has increasingly called for more classroom-based research focusing on language teaching approaches that embrace students’ plurilingual repertoires as valuable linguistic and cultural resources for learning and affirm learners’ plurilingual identities as legitimate and appropriate in the classroom context. This paper discusses research findings of an empirical investigation that responded to this call. The study examined the impact of the use of plurilingual tasks in the English as foreign language (EFL) classroom on language learning processes and learners’ identity construction. Five case studies were conducted in four primary schools and one secondary school in Germany. Research data were collected from multiple sources such as field notes, video recording of school lessons, in-depth interviews with teachers, teachers’ reflective journals, anonymous questionnaires, and focus group interviews with learners. The research findings have shown that the use of plurilingual tasks in the EFL classroom created enhanced opportunities for the learners (a) to share aspects of their identities that were previously ignored in the school context (b) to use their diverse language abilities as resources in the language learning process and (c) to be actively involved in explicit reflective thinking about language and culture.

The present study examines how LGBT is represented discursively in the Bangkok Post , a major English-language newspaper in Thailand, using corpus linguistic methods. A corpus of news reports on LGBT-related matters in the Bangkok Post was compiled. Statistically significant collocates of each word that makes up the acronym were extracted and analyzed in comparison with those found from two international newspaper corpora: COCA and SiBol. It was found that collocations that point to “political movement”, “crime” and “HIV” are shared by the three corpora, suggesting the press’s common stance on the newsworthiness of these issues and at the same time its contribution to the construction and circulation of these discourses related to LGBT. However, the Bangkok Post is marked off from the reference corpora by beauty contest discourse and the absence of issues about the disclosure of homosexual identities and LGBT representation in entertainment. This suggests socio-cultural influence in the way LGBT is represented in Thailand’s English-language newspaper.

Researchers have become interested in the emotion in feedback situations, yet little research has examined peer feedback-giving emotions. Giving feedback is emotionally laden and it is challenging and demanding for feedback givers to manage their emotions. Uncovering how feedback givers regulate their emotions as well as determining what influences them could extend the current understanding of the peer feedback-giving process. Informed by emotional intelligence (EI) (Goleman, Daniel. 1995.  Emotional intelligence . London: Bloomsbury Publishing.), a notion describing an individual’s ability to monitor and manage one’s own and others’ emotions, this case study investigated how two Chinese Ph.D. English as a foreign language students utilized EI to regulate their feedback-giving process on research proposal writing. Data was collected from research proposal drafts and revisions, peer feedback, self-reported emotions, interviews, and stimulated recalls. The textual and qualitative data analysis revealed that individual differences existed regarding feedback focus, strategies, and emotions. The findings suggested that the feedback givers adopted different EI patterns to regulate their feedback giving process under the influence of five factors: goals and purposes, prior feedback experience, time constraints, the intimacy of relations, and the feedback givers’ perceived significance of the sections in a research proposal. Practical implications for teachers, supervisors, and students were discussed.

In the present study, we introduce a response-time-based test that can be used to detect concealed language knowledge, for various potential applications (e.g., espionage, border control, counter-terrorism). In this test, the examinees are asked to respond to repeatedly presented items, including a real word in the language tested (suspected to be known by the examinee) and several pseudowords. A person who understands the tested language recognizes the real word and tends to have slower responses to it as compared to the pseudowords, and, thereby, can be distinguished from those who do not understand the language. This was demonstrated in a series of experiments including diverse participants tested for their native language (German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian; n  = 312), for second language (English, German; n  = 66), and several control groups ( n  = 192).