In the coming decades, nations worldwide, exacerbated by political and environmental instability, will likely continue to struggle to deal with growing numbers of displaced persons.In this study I take an interactional sociolinguistic approach to exploring a critical area of refugee resettlement; that is, securing stable, desirable employment in host nations.Navigating the labour market in a new context can be a challenge for any migrant, and particularly so for former refugees. Host governments tend to consider accessing stable, long-term employment to be the most important factor for former refugees' social integration. It is also a high priority for former refugees themselves, who are often unable to find employment appropriate for their qualification and experience levels.I approach this issue of employability from the perspective of an employable identity, rooted within a social constructionist view of identity as emergent from and negotiated within discourse. This approach facilitates a view of employability as a discursive and socially situated phenomenon, which is interactionally achieved with employers, interviewers, and colleagues. Specifically, I explore the negotiation of employable identities in narratives, the stories we tell about ourselves through which we make sense of our place in the social world.Narratives are rich sites within which to explore the co-constructed negotiation of identity, through the positioning of self (both as narrator and protagonist) and other (both present interlocutor(s) and other characters within the storyworld).This study comprises two phases. The first involves four highly-educated former refugee participants originating from different Middle Eastern and North and East African countries.

Navigating the labour market in a new context can be a challenge for any migrant, and particularly so for former refugees, who are often unable to find employment appropriate for their qualification and experience levels. This study takes an Interactional Sociolinguistic approach to exploring how three former refugees navigate employability in narrative, from the social constructionist perspective of employable identities, emergent from and negotiated within discourse. The study focuses specifically on the participants’ discursive navigation of their various (Bourdieusian) social and cultural capital and its importance to labour market performance. Evident in the data are the difficulties of translating – or having recognised – a lifetime’s accumulation of capital, often rendered worthless upon migration. Such challenges impact upon forced migrants’ ability to successfully enact employability, and subsequently upon their imagined (future) identities. This research highlights former refugees’ complex challenges involved with successful navigation of employability in a new context.

outlines some limitations of the methodology, and offers potential implications for healthcare. As the research is interdisciplinary in nature, the book will appeal to linguists, health communication researchers, and practitioners. The corpus linguistics methods and terminology are clearly explained so that even readers new to this field can engage easily with the topic.

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that the method of analysis must dramatically differ from similar studies on English because local intonational contours are employed in lexical tone. She finds that a final accent can signal possible turn completion. Chapter 5 offers an analysis of ways that gesture can be employed in turn organization, in particular the use of hand movements and posture shifts. These frequently coincide with boundaries of both single-and multi-TCUs (turnconstruction units). Li notes that gestures are employed in a variety of functions including holding turns, indicating a sequence of actions such as question and response, and signaling turn completion. Finally, chapter 6 analyzes the interaction of each of these methods of organizing turns. Rarely does any one method exist in isolation and frequently the various signals used to organize turns conflict with each other or fail to coincide. Li did find a significant trend for syntax and body movements to signal possible turn-completion while prosody and certain pragmatic factors were more likely to signal turn-continuation. This book is not meant to be a complete account of turn-taking in Mandarin. However, Li has elegantly chosen the most relevant features of syntax, prosody, and gesture to illustrate how the system as a whole functions. In providing this account of Mandarin turn organization and, in particular, the ways that many of its features differ from English turn organization, she has highlighted the need for more research on languages other than English, frequently offering suggestions for further research herself. This book is a solid and informative contribution to our knowledge of turn-taking systems and multimodality in language.