Workplace Language Teaching and the Intercultural Construction of Ideologies of Competence

Abstract

Drawing on data from a larger ethnographic study of workplace literacy programs serving immigrants in California, this article describes workplace literacy classes at Cableco, a cable manufacturing plant serving the booming electronics industry in California's Silicon Valley. Language classes began at the factory in the mid-1990s to help immigrant employees gain English skills that managers perceived as crucial to promoting smooth work flow and good business. Blending ethnographic, critical discourse analytic and interactional sociolinguistic approaches, the author illustrates how a language lesson called ‘Who Gets Recognition in the United States' reveals underlying assumptions about gender, power, group allegiance, and politeness. These ideologically grounded assumptions were embedded in the lesson as well as in broader workplace language practices shaping managers' and employees' diverging conceptions of competence and their perceptions of one another. The data - a workplace literacy lesson, employees' responses to it, and an interview with the manufacturing manager - demonstrate some of the dangers of conceiving of language as a discrete workplace skill. They also illustrate how discursive practices can engender unequal institutional power relations while simultaneously providing a space, albeit a very small one, for workers to contest managers’ attempts to reshape their identities through language practice.