Dissertationsprojekt

Language and Belonging: L2 Proficiency Development and In-Group Identification in a Multilingual Healthcare 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 study investigates the relationship between the development of different linguistic competences and the feeling of belonging in the everyday multilingual work team.

Elicited and authentic workplace audio recordings, collected from selected individuals at different points throughout one year, will be analysed using 18 measures of CAF (Skehan 1998; Housen, Kuiken & Vedder 2012) as well as comprehensibility (Suzuki & Kormos 2020). The study investigates belonging from a social psychological viewpoint as in-group-identification, the extent to which individuals define themselves in terms of their group membership and feel psychologically invested in that group (Leach et al. 2008). The relationship between the different linguistic competence measures and belonging will then be examined.

Research Questions

(1) To what extent does the participants’ interlanguage develop in terms of complexity, accuracy, fluency (CAF), and overall comprehensibility?

(2) To what degree do participants feel a sense of belonging to their work team?

(3) Is there a correlation between language proficiency, its development over time, and participants’ sense of belonging within the team?