Language Learners’ Transferable Skills and Narrative Competence in U.S. Career Advising Appointments: Multilingual Development Beyond Higher Education

ABSTRACT

In a career climate that casts “foreign” language proficiency as a measurable and technical skill, this study examines how the notion of transferable skills alternatively mediates how collegiate language learners (LLs) co-construct multilingual-professional trajectories in career advising appointments. In particular, it focuses on how LLs are positioned as perpetually responsible for acquiring and articulating transferable skills of sorts and the affordances of this ideology for sustained engagement with the target language (TL) beyond higher education. Data include five audio-recorded, transcribed career advising appointments with collegiate LLs of five non-English TLs. Excerpts from advising appointments illustrate how transferable skills may or may not be constructed as emanating from language learning but are assumed to provide access to new settings wherein LLs develop professional identities through TL use. The findings highlight socialization processes as LLs develop narrative competence to essentialize skill sets for continuity between previous and prospective positions to construct themselves as employable.

KEYWORDS:

• Career advising
• lifespan bilingualism
• multilingual development
• narrative analysis
• transferable skills

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was presented at ACTFL 2023 in Chicago, IL. I thank the audience members for engaging with my work and the two anonymous reviewers for sharing their time and expertise. A special thanks goes to Dr. Catherine Stafford for chairing the dissertation project from which this study was drawn. Any remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. While the present discussion and study are situated in the North American context, the perception that languages are hard, technical skills transcends the United States, and readers will undoubtedly recognize this ideology playing out in various global settings. Moreover, this language-as-skill ideology serves as a point of departure to examine the relationship between multilingual and transferable skills development—a less familiar and understudied interpolation that may also resonate with diverse audiences.

2. U.S. employers across sectors ranked pre-identified career competencies sought on applicants’ resumes. The top 20 employable attributes depicted in Figure 1 are based on 172 survey responses collected in 2018, representing an 18.5% response rate.

3. Transcription conventions are provided in Appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by grants from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Graduate School, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and UW–Madison, and the UW–Madison Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition, with funding from the Language Institute.

Notes on contributors

Ryan Anthony Goble

Ryan Anthony Goble, PhD, is an Academic Program Specialist in the Language Program Office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. In this role, he coordinates the South Asia Summer Language Institute (SASLI) and the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Career Fair as part of the Wisconsin Intensive Summer Language Institutes (WISLI).