Affordances for language learning in a call centre

Abstract

Ensuring newly arrived migrants gain fluency in the language of their host country has challenged governments worldwide. Whilst many governments provide settlement and language programs for migrants, a critical site for language development and cultural integration is the workplace itself. However very few studies have explored how different worksites and job types in the new globalised economy may facilitate migrants' acquisition of the language of a target community with which they need to communicate. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study and sets of interviews, this research explores how a multilingual call centre based in London facilitates such language acquisition. This site uses English as well as a number of other European languages to market mostly IT products into Europe and beyond and we discuss how the training and provision of scripts contributes to agents being able to develop their language skills. This study revealed a number of facilitators for language acquisition including the spatial layout of the worksite where communication, both socially and professionally, takes place; but perhaps most surprisingly, we learned that the way in which the agents use scripts to scaffold their exchanges on phones plays a significant role in language acquisition.