Communicating employability: the role of communicative competence for Zimbabwean highly skilled migrants in the UK

Skilled migration is an increasingly important topic for both policy and research internationally. OECD governments in particular are wrestling with tensions between their desire to use skilled migration to be on the winning side in the ‘global war for talent’ and their pandering to and/or attempts to outflank rising xenophobia. One aspect that has received relatively little attention is skilled migration from the African Commonwealth to the UK, a situation in which skilled migrants have relatively high levels of linguistic capital in the language of the host country. We focus here on the case of Zimbabwe. In spite of its popular image as a failed state, Zimbabwe has an exceptionally strong educational tradition and high levels of literacy and fluency in English. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews of Zimbabwean highly skilled migrants, we explore the specific ways in which the communicative competences of these migrants with high formal levels of English operate in complex ways to shape their employability strategies and outcomes. We offer two main findings: first, that a dichotomy exists between their high level formal linguistic competence and their ability to communicate in less formal interactions, which challenges their employability, at least when they first move to the UK; and second, that they also lack, at least initially, the competence to narrativise their employability in ways that are culturally appropriate in England. Thus, to realise the full potential of their high levels of human capital, they need to learn how to communicate competently in a very different social and occupational milieu. Some have achieved this, but others continue to struggle

A Dominant Language Constellations case-study on language use and the affective domain

Globalisation, international mobility, and new technologies make current multilingualism qualitatively different to not only mono- and bi-lingualism but also to any of its historical incarnations. As a new linguistic dispensation (Aronin & Singleton, 2008, 2012; Aronin, 2015), current multilingualism is understood to be complex, suffusive, liminal, and super-diverse; four essential properties which necessitate alternative foci in multilingual research. From this view, multilinguals are the ‘glue’ that binds cultures and societies, it is therefore essential to focus on their socioculturally-situated multilingual practices if we are to better understand the protagonists of this considerable social responsibility. In this regard, two concepts of profound interest are multilinguality (Aronin & Ó Laoire, 2004) and, its expression/realisation in concrete time-frames and socio-cultural contexts, dominant language constellations (DLC - Aronin, 2006; 2016). With this in mind, the current study examines the individual DLC of a Moroccan immigrant living in the Valencian Community in Spain. In line with earlier research calling for more varied self-report data (Todeva & Cenoz, 2009; Canagarajah & Wurr, 2011; Gorter & Cenoz, 2011), the study uses semi-structured interviews to investigate relationships between the DLC and the affective domain; specifically, attitudes, emotion, and identity. The resulting qualitative data explores the following questions: How does a multilingual speaker use their DLC to navigate specific sociolinguistic contexts? What influence does the DLC have on the expression of identity and emotions in concrete daily situations? What role does the DLC play in the formation of language attitudes? Moreover, these issues are framed within an acculturation context to articulate what Canagarajah and Wurr (2011) call ‘voices from the periphery’. While accepting that a case-study limits any attempt at generalisation, it is hoped that this research focus may contribute by providing another small piece to the overall puzzle of multilingual practices realised in concrete social and cultural contexts

‘We Learn Together’—Translanguaging within a Holistic Approach towards Multilingualism in Education

Within two multilingual education projects in the north of the Netherlands a holistic model for multilingualism in education is being tested. This is done through design-based interventions in which in- and pre-service teachers, teacher trainers and researchers co-develop and evaluate multilingual activities for different school types. Results show that through experimenting in a safe environment teachers gradually embraced their pupils’ multilingualism. This contradicts earlier findings on teachers strongly favouring monolingual instruction and viewing migrant languages as a deficit.<br/

Science Scholars

With this small-scale qualitative investigation, we aimed to capture the views of a group of Turkish arts and science scholars' construction of their RA introductions in their field-specific academic writings. Through our readings of the literature, we identified four main concerns for the semi-structured face-to-face interviews: (1) these writers' construction process of RA introductions, (2) their descriptions of a specific single-authored RA introduction; (3) how they revised these introductions and the challenges/problems they experienced while revising and (4) while reviewing others' introductions, what expectations they had and what problems they observed. The semi-structured face-to-face interviews enabled us to see how commonly the CARS model is followed by these authors. Other than the prototypicality of this three-part model, their statements stressed an awareness of the differences in academic conventions in national and international journals as a crucial concern to be considered while shaping the content of their writing