Globalizing construction work and local language practices (GLO-LO)

Construction industry in Finland provides employment for an increasing number of adults with immigrant background. It also attracts temporary workers, especially from Estonia. This diversification of workforce in construction industry brings about increasing multilingualism which, in turn, creates new kinds of challenges for work-related language practices.

This project investigates local language practices in multilingual construction sites, and focuses on analyzing how co-workers coordinate courses of physical action. The project zooms into these interactions with the methods of multimodal conversation analysis. Concrete construction projects will be video-recorded and the language practices analyzed from a holistic viewpoint paying attention to the use of the different languages, as well as embodied and material resources.

The results will provide new understanding about how language in general, and different languages (Finnish, Estonian, Arabic, English), in particular, are used in multilingual construction sites as part of the physical work. The results can be used to create sustainable language educational solutions.