Introduction
In contemporary society there is a tendency for work to be seen as fundamental to our own and othersâ understandings of who we are, what we do and how we fit in the world. Professional identities, roles and relationships give substance to our sense of self and influence our daily interactions, decisions and directions in life. This book explores how professionals make sense of and manage their experience of relocating to live and work, with a focus on their interactions with others. I take as a starting point the idea that language is central to and constitutive of professional expertise, identity and membership, drawing on Goodwinâs (1994) notion of professional vision, through which he explored the dynamic processes and interactional nature of being a professional and belonging to a professional community. Goodwin brought a focus on the interrelationship between what and how professionals âknowâ, their use of language and their âembodied practiceâ (1994, p. 611). In light of increasing professional mobility and virtual global connectedness, I argue the need to reconsider the kind of professional expertise required in contemporary professional practice where interactions often involve multiple languages and cultures. To better understand the ways such expertise is developed and enacted in the lives of professionals, I will make connections with the notion of âinterculturalityâ (Kramsch, 2011, p. 354).
In developing his idea of professional vision, Goodwin argued that the talk, text and actions of professionals extend beyond merely communicating their knowledge and skills. Their use of language in interactions with clients and colleagues is a highly coordinated, coherent and purposeful activity that enables them to represent reality in particular ways, as they organise what is observable, highlighting some things as salient, and prioritising certain perspectives over others. This involves the use of âcoding schemesâ, where talk, text and actions are coded, creating âobjects of knowledgeâ relevant to their practice (Goodwin, 1994, p. 606). For Goodwin, the process of coding systematically generates âan orientation toward the worldâ (1994, p. 609), creating structures that not only support particular ways of seeing the world, but also ways of thinking, feeling, interpreting, responding and evaluating. To make certain phenomena and events visible to other people, professionals create distinctions between what is salient and what is simply background, through âhighlightingâ (Goodwin, 1994, p. 610). In highlighting features that they deem relevant, professionals influence how they and other people perceive what is going on and what is at stake. This enables them to produce and articulate particular versions of what is known and ârealâ through talk, text and actions in their professional practice. Here, practice is more than simply the knowledge and skills, or competence, that they have and is fundamental to their ways of being and acting in interaction with others. The authority and capability to accomplish this is not readily available to all, which has social consequences for people involved in professional interactions. The bottom line according to this argument is that professionals, through their use of language, are in fact creating the very phenomena and events that constitute their expertise, which has consequences for how identities, roles and relationships are understood and enacted moment by moment in interactions.
If one takes the position that professionals use language to foreground certain perspectives, this means that their linguistic choices enable a particular view of the situation at hand in any professional encounter, a view in which their expertise can be seen as meeting the needs for which it was sought. This is usually accomplished so adeptly that even when people who are seeking this expertise are unaware of the nature and extent of their potential needs, it is the talk, text and actions of professionals that languages (Swain, 2009) these issues, and their solutions, into existence. Professionals therefore are not only equipped with knowledge and skills, but also with power, as they strategically use language to set the agenda in professional encounters.
For the most part, professionals are not explicitly taught the language practices that are constitutive of their professional expertise, rather they are implicitly learned, internalised social processes for which they may have no metalanguage to articulate what or how it is they actually create and enact their expertise linguistically. This lack of awareness of the central role of language in shaping perceptions of who they are and what they do presents a further challenge for professionals, especially when working with people who bring different linguistic resources and different cultural perspectives to making sense of professional encounters. The argument of this book builds on the central theme that language, understood in a dynamic sense as languaging (Swain, 2009), is fundamental to professional expertise, identity and role enactment as proposed by the notion of professional vision. While Goodwin considered this idea within a single language, I explore and elaborate on this theme by taking into account what this means for all professionals within and across languages. This is an important consideration in the context of growing linguistic and cultural diversity, when interactions in contemporary professional practice frequently involve multiple languages and cultures, and multiple ways of understanding what is going on, who is involved and what is at stake.
There is a need to better understand the nexus between language use and professional practice as professionals and those who depend on their expertise are increasingly required to navigate growing complexity and uncertainty in interactions on a daily basis, and the field of applied linguistics has taken a particular interest in how such professional expertise, identities and language(s) intersect (Sarangi & Candlin, 2011). This rapidly developing challenge for professional practice is being generated by increasing human mobility, which brings people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds into contact with one another. This is not simply an intellectual challenge, and the emotional and evaluative dimensions are articulated by Charlotte, a professional who participated in the study on which this book is based:
Iâve suffered from that a long time here ⊠because you know youâre a foreigner ⊠you donât know the rules ⊠if you donât know the language very well they look at you as if youâre a wally (an idiot) and they muck around with you because you donât understand ⊠thatâs not fair.
Charlotte, who relocated from France to live and work in Australia, reflects on her experience of being misunderstood by colleagues and clients, both in terms of her use of language and how she is interpreted and subsequently evaluated as a person and a professional. Recalling the notion of professional vision, there is more at stake here for Charlotte than (mis)communication alone. Her understanding of the kind of activity that is going on in a given interaction (Levinson, 1979) and her use of language matters in critical ways to how people understand her professional expertise and identity, and her status and practice, with consequences for how she may participate and belong in her social and professional worlds. Increasingly, contemporary professionals such as Charlotte must not only possess the expertise that their field demands but must also develop flexible ways of engaging with people in contexts where multiple languages, cultures and understandings may be actively or passively present, from the side of the professional themselves, or from the side of their colleagues or clients. This theme of professional participation and membership in contemporary linguistic and cultural diversity builds on Goodwinâs notion of the centrality of language and is taken up and explored throughout the book, with an emphasis on language understood in interrelationship with culture, where both languages and cultures are conceptualised as dynamic (Kramsch, 2011; Liddicoat, 2009a).
While Goodwinâs (1994) paper was seminal in making the point that language is not only a matter of communicating professional expertise, but is also constitutive of that expertise, there is a need to reconsider this point in some depth in light of contemporary, âcomplexâ diversity (Kraus, 2012), in order to explore the kinds of expertise that professionals now require in terms of their language practices. This remains relevant even when professional encounters ostensibly involve a âsharedâ language such as English, as shared understandings cannot be assumed in complex configurations of diversity, due to shifting constellations of potential and at times unpredictable linguistic and cultural considerations. This point is illustrated by FĂ©lix, another professional who participated in the study, who comments on the practice of some colleagues who appear less aware of the impact of their language choices in interactions involving people for whom English is an additional language:
I can see the way they talk to these people and itâs really appalling ⊠itâs really really bad.
For FĂ©lix, the professional vision of such colleagues lacks acuity, and he foregrounds, highlights and articulates their inability to respond appropriately and flexibly in interactions where there may be multiple languages and cultures, and diverse interpretations of meaning, understandings, knowledge, perspectives and values, latently yet powerfully present. These quotes from Cha...