Language Use in a Multilingual Workplace

This month we published Domestic Workers Talk by Kellie Gonçalves and Anne Ambler Schluter. In this post the authors introduce the book and explain what inspired it. 

This study of Shine (a multilingual cleaning company) was inspired by the dearth of sociolinguistic work carried out in domestic labor contexts and blue-collar workplaces more generally. As Kellie had close familial ties to Magda, Shine’s owner, we were able to gain access to all employees (migrant women who speak Portuguese and Spanish) and several of Shine’s Anglophone clients who reside in an upper-class suburb of New York City. As such, we were able to talk to the company owner (Magda), all of her employees and several clients in order to better understand how communication is achieved in a small private business where European Portuguese serves as the company internal language despite the company’s geographical location in the US, where English is the dominant language.

Our study had a strong ethnographic component to it meaning that we were also able to observe how the company hierarchy was structured and how daily business was carried out. As both Kellie and Anne are speakers of English, Portuguese and Spanish (at different levels), we were able to witness first-hand how different languages and different language varieties were valued, mixed, and used among domestic workers with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

At the same time, we were also able to observe the diverse, creative linguistic and embodied resources drawn on to facilitate communication among domestic workers and their Anglophone clients. Because Magda, the company owner, is a multilingual speaker, she often facilitated communication between her employees and clients thus serving as the main language broker of the company. This fact coupled with domestic workers’ ability to use both Portuguese and Spanish in Newark, NJ (where many domestic workers reside) diminished most domestic workers’ need and even motivation to learn English while simultaneously allowing Magda to control and micro-manage communication between her employees and clients. English was therefore not a prerequisite for employment at Shine.

Due to Magda’s professional background in finance, as well as her managerial and multilingual skills, we also investigated the complex power relations among her, her migrant female employees as well as her Anglophone clients. While we found Magda’s managerial style to be very direct and authoritative, she also had a very soft side to her with regard to both her employees and clients resulting in little turnover of her staff and a high demand for Shine’s cleaning services.

Overall, the book traces the story of Magda as a migrant domestic worker herself, who left Brazil in the 1970s to work as a live-in nanny for an upper-class Brazilian family in New Jersey up until the establishment of Shine in the mid 1980s. We collected data for this project beginning in 2011 until shortly before the book was published in order to provide readers with an accurate and up to date account of how Shine was created and successfully run until Magda’s retirement in 2019 shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic.

We believe our study adds to the growing body of research on language and domestic work by taking embodied sociolinguistics, posthumanism and emotional intelligence into account while simultaneously maintaining a critical perspective on multilingualism, the feminine gendered nature of domestic work as well as the inherent power relations between majority and minority language speakers, where issues of class, gender and citizenship prevail.

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Exploring (Im)mobilities edited by Anna De Fina and Gerardo Mazzaferro.

Negotiating Identities, Language and Migration in Global London

This month we published Negotiating Identities, Language and Migration in Global London edited by Cangbai Wang and Terry Lamb. In this post the editors reveal what readers can expect from the book.

London as a global city has been a ‘contact zone’ of multiple flows of people, cultures and ideas from around the world. While there are numerous studies of individual migrant communities in London and the UK, surprisingly, so far very few have investigated the nexus between mobility, cities and languages in London across different migrant groups. This edited volume is an attempt to address this gap by bringing together contextualised and cutting-edge research on a wide range of London-based migrant communities. It seeks to bridge segregated research into migrant groups, stimulate intellectual dialogues between academic and migrant communities, and lay the groundwork for interdisciplinary and comparative research into migrants in London and beyond.

The publication is the result of the collective efforts of HOMELandS (Hub on Migration, Exile, Languages and Spaces), an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Westminster. Located in central London and with many of its members coming from different countries and being migrants themselves, since its launch in 2014, HOMELandS has dedicated itself to promoting theoretically informed, interdisciplinary-oriented and language-based research on migration and diaspora in the global context. As a superdiverse urban space and a ‘migration laboratory’, London has naturally become one of the major sites for HOMELandS research. Instead of treating the city as a static physical container or an abstract geographical location, we see it as an ongoing set of possibilities in which the city’s meanings and potential uses are negotiated and released by the activities of migrants as transnational urban dwellers. We pay particular attention to the creative agency of migrants who endeavour to reconfigure existing discursive categories and power relations and engage with the social and political (re)construction of place and identity. The book in a way defines who we are as a research centre and gives a glimpse of the future and potential of London-based research into migration and diaspora that we are doing and will continue to do.

Another distinctive feature, and contribution, of the book is its interdisciplinary ambition in unpacking the complex relations between migration, cities and languages. We use ‘languaging’ as the central concept to integrate relevant research on migrants in applied linguistics, performativity and critical heritage studies. We define ‘language’ in a broad and metaphorical sense, referring to various kinds of material and immaterial practices that give voices to individuals and communities, enabling them to hear and be heard, and to communicate. Three distinctive ‘language spaces’ are identified and used to structure the book. The first one is ‘metrolingual space’ where people engage creatively with cultural translation to represent identities and values; the second one is ‘performative space’ where people of migrant background resort to various art forms to articulate a sense of being and belonging and to search for empowerment; the third one is ‘heritagisation space’ where the diasporic past is remembered, treasured and transmitted to the public and to the next generation, not only through the medium of words but also the silent ‘talking’ of objects. These three ‘language spaces’ are by no means static and mutually exclusive. Rather, they interact with each other in generating valuable opportunities for identity negotiation and opening up new spaces for the future through the very act of languaging.

This book makes a compelling case for mutual constitutiveness of migrants and cities –the city is not external to the identities and belongings of migrants in the same way as migrants are not external to the fabric and the ethos of the city. Migrants and cities produce and reproduce each other through multiple forms of everyday and ongoing negotiations in the intersection of the global and the local. In addition, we hope the publication of this book could further promote ‘language-based’ or ‘language-sensitive’ research as a tool for data collection and ethnographic fieldwork, which is crucial for generating fresh and in-depth insights into the issues of identities, belonging and inclusion that bear broad implications for the studies of migration and societies in post-Brexit Britain and beyond.

Cangbai Wang

For more information about this book please see our website.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Exploring (Im)mobilities edited by Anna De Fina and Gerardo Mazzaferro.

How Can We Meet the Language Learning Needs of Refugees?

We will soon be publishing Meeting the Needs of Reunited Refugee Families by Sarah Cox. In this post Sarah introduces her book.

This book explores the gap between policy, practice and academic literature within language learning for refugees. Both policy and academic literature recognise the benefits of multilingual approaches to language learning, however language classes are often based on monolingual pedagogies which centre on the need to use the target language as much as possible.

The book explores the language learning needs of a small group of refugee women and their children who had recently arrived in Scotland through family reunion. The book is based on a 5-month teaching study, using critical participatory action research to develop a multilingual approach, which combined translanguaging principles (where people use all their linguistic resources to learn) with decolonising methodology. The book is set within the context of arrival in the host community which is often a period of disorientation and profound change.

To draw the recommendations for multilingual approaches into teaching practice, rather than teaching and researching solely in English, I became a learner of the participants’ languages (Tigrinya, Tamil, Farsi and Arabic) to explore how teachers and researchers might use a multilingual approach even when they don’t speak the same languages as their learners/research participants. The translanguaging ‘stance’ we adopted meant embracing an openness to other languages and using them as much as possible in the research. In the book I talk about how this approach can be part of ‘linguistic hospitality’ which complements the principle of two-way, mutual integration laid out in Scotland’s New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy.

The book centres on three key findings:

1. The first is that decolonial, collaborative learner/teacher relationships bring particular benefits in terms of empowerment and confidence-building for refugee women during the initial stages of refugee arrival. These relationships were enhanced by the shift of power created by the teacher participating as a learner and by researching and teaching multilingually.
2. The second is the importance of the physical environment and the connections people have with their new physical surroundings as they develop a sense of belonging. In the book I draw on ecological approaches to language education and human geography to illustrate language learning as orientation to a new physical environment in a human and embodied way.
3. Thirdly I explore the ‘languaging’ within ‘translanguaging’ as a two-way dialogical process which valorises the full linguistic repertoire and encourages learners and teachers to draw on all their linguistic resources to learn. I consider ways that learners’ home languages can be harnessed in the classroom and detail our experiences of using translanguaging pedagogy. We found multilingual strategies brought particular benefits at the very beginning of learning English so soon after arrival.

The book illustrates how policy, practice and theory might be brought closer together as part of a decolonial approach to language teaching that shifts the balance of power in the classroom, repositions the roles of teacher / researcher and learner / participant and addresses inequality between languages by reducing the dominance of English. The themes of mutual integration and language learning as solidarity are at the heart of the book.

I hope the book will be relevant for anyone interested in ESOL, refugee integration, language teaching, language policy or researching multilingually.

If you found this interesting, you might also like Decolonising Multilingualism by Alison Phipps.