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

Abstract

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.