The Pragmatics of Making Requests in the L2 Workplace: A Case Study of Language Socialization

Abstract

The workplace is one of many sociocultural contexts where novices within a culture, like immigrant women, become socialized into new discourse systems and cultures. As second language (L2) speakers, the process of language socialization in the workplace involves double socialization: as a novice in a new work environment and as novice operating within a new language and culture. Focusing on L2 requesting behaviour, this ethnographic case study deals with the important issue of the pragmatics of higher-stakes social communications. The contextualized examples provided here illustrate how, through exposure and participation in social interactions and with the assistance of experts or more competent peers, an immigrant woman came to internalize target language and cultural norms and develop communicative competence in ESL in the workplace. More specifically, she learned to make requests more directly than she had been accustomed by adopting certain sociolinguistic strategies and expressions. The research on which this paper is based represents a new direction in TESOL workplace-oriented research, combining interlanguage pragmatics, ethnography, and language socialization.

The Impact of Language and Skills Training on Immigrants's Lives

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Acculturation and acquisition of pragmatic routines in the study abroad context

“…Given their culturally-bound nature, learning routines will also facilitate learning about the sociocultural norms of the TL, and therefore enhance language proficiency. This was illustrated in Li's (2000) case study on language socialization in the workplace by a Chinese immigrant woman. By engaging in intercultural encounters with higher-proficient learners, she gained knowledge of TL sociocultural norms and improved her repertoire of request routines to communicate more successfully with her co-workers.…”

Affordances and constraints: Second language learning in cleaning work

“…Newly arrived migrants experience a double socialization into the workplace, because they need to learn a new language and culture in addition to the practices of the new work environment (Li 2000). So far, workplace-oriented language learning research has mostly focused on discipline-specific discourse practices in professions that require higher education, such as engineering, law, medicine and nursing (Duff 2008: 265;Duff et al 2000;Mertz 2007;Sarangi and Roberts 1999).…”