‘Speak English!’: social acceleration and language learning in the workplace

ABSTRACT

Skilled migration to Australia depends on a good command of English. Where skilled migrants lack English – like the participants in this study – yet fulfil the vocational-skill employment requirement, they are granted temporary visas and provisionally employed but expected to improve their English on the job. They are assumed by mainstream society to practise with English-speaking colleagues; however, their conveyor-belt-like tasks make it impossible for them to engage in talk at work. While fulfilling their work contract, they need to improve their English proficiency to meet permanent residency requirements. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study with Filipino skilled migrants, this paper uses ‘social acceleration’ (Rosa [2013]. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press.) as a lens to examine the processes this group experiences in their employment in Australia. These processes are varied and complex, referred to in this paper as macro- and micro-accelerants that contribute to both acceleration of social change and of their pace of life. This paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of the ‘driving forces of acceleration’ Filipino skilled migrants face particularly in the way they navigate their English language learning against the pressures of a monolingual mindset and of ‘social acceleration’. (195)

KEYWORDS:

• Social acceleration
• skilled migration
• language learning in the workplace

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by Macquarie University New Staff Grant [grant number 9200900048].

Notes on contributors

Loy Lising

Loy Lising is a sociolinguist at the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research interest lies at the intersection of multilingualism and migration. Employing both qualitative and corpus approaches, she investigates the enduring consequences of this convergence on key issues such as heritage language maintenance, the changing linguistic ecology of a society due to language contact through migration, and the multilingual practices present in a largely monolingual society like Australia.