Dissertationsprojekt

Linguistic positioning of L2-German-speaking nursing professionals in a multilingual team

This dissertation is part of the longitudinal research project "The Multilingual Hospital: The Production of Migration through Language as a Communicative and Social Infrastructure", conducted within the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1604) at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS), Osnabrück. The project is designated as subproject B5 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Christine Dimroth.

The dissertation aims to investigate the linguistic strategies of L2-German-speaking nursing professionals within their Community of Practice (CoP) (Lave & Wenger, 1991), a multilingual work team in a German hospital, while focusing on their linguistic positioning in various social and communicative tasks, e.g. creating a sense of belonging, solving problems and participating in decision-making processes. These findings will be correlated with the language competence and the language development of the L2 speakers.

Usage-Based Linguistics (UBL) – approaches in Second-Language-Acquisition (Eskildsen 2022) assume that language learning occurs through repeated experience with concrete linguistic utterances. Social interaction is central. The individual and the collective-social levels of meaning are interdependent (Berthele 2016). The connection between individual abilities and collective communication processes has often been neglected in research to date. Case studies show that linguistic competence provides the greatest agency within an institutional context (Moyer 2013). We assume that linguistic accommodation plays a central role, as it serves as a means of ensuring understanding and building relationships in medical conversations (Imo 2019). However, the communication practices of L2-German-speaking nurses remain under-researched.