Language practices at (our) work

Ich packe meinen Koffer und nehme mit… eine Konferenzpräsentation! Our research group is pretty multilingual, and we love to learn languages from each other. A couple of months ago Nathalie taught us some German with the help of a game that really made us long for trips abroad, as we had to imagine what to pack in our luggage. Finally, we had a reason to pack our Koffers and sail to Stockholm to present at ASLA 2022 symposium that focused on (multilingual) language practices and language learning.

Our presentation dealt with emerging expertise in both construction work and in Finnish language. We got some excellent comments, one of them being a question central to our whole project: if and how language learning happens while working. The discussion that followed and continued to coffee breaks and at the conference dinner (depicted in the picture), made us not only think about language learning at work with regards to our research project but also with regards to our own language practices. Even though our office is regularly filled with enthusiastic chatter about different languages, the language of our conversations has way too often been English, not giving our L2 speaker opportunities to use and learn more Finnish.

Already before the trip we had talked about speaking more Finnish at work. While sometimes English simply is the most efficient and equal way of discussing complex ideas regarding the research, not switching to Finnish for coffee breaks is more a matter of habit. Thus, after the trip we decided to shift to more intentional use of multilingual resources.

One option is receptive multilingualism, meaning that different people speak different languages. “Receptive” refers to the idea of not having to have high active skills in the other language, but “only understanding it” is enough. For example, in Stockholm we realized that all of us could easily follow the presentations in Swedish, but it was more comfortable to ask questions in English. After commiting to the idea, using Finnish and English in such way has been quite effortless, and Nathalie and Hanna-Ilona have started to do it in German and Finnish as well – often while working with a text in English. That has resulted in a fun and creative mix of languages that someone should definitely study ; )

 

Teksti: Hanna-Ilona Härmävaara

Kuva: Silvia Kunitz