Mas Marunong Kang Mag-English (You’re Better at English-Ing): Professional Ventriloquy and the Ideologies of “Professionalism”

ABSTRACT

This article unpacks the ideologies of “professionalism” by examining how international and multilingual identities are negotiated through the enactment of workplace genres. Relying on autoethnographic narrative vignettes that highlight the affective labor inherent in such identity negotiation, this article moves beyond traditional workplace contexts to explore familial sites of intergenerational knowledge construction. The author argues that “professionalism” for multilingual communicators is bound by native-speaker paradigms and colonial language ideologies that complicate how expertise is voiced.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual identity
• cover letters
• résumés
• workplace genres
• language ideologies

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juval V. Racelis

Juval V. Racelis is an Associate Professor of English at Wentworth Institute of Technology. His research focuses on writing program administration, equitable placement practices, and technical and professional communication pedagogy. His research has appeared in Language Teaching and Collaborative Librarianship.