Dissertationsprojekt

Language and Belonging Work. Correlating L2 Proficiency (CAF) with Social Positioning 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 how the development of different linguistic competences correlates with the production and negotiation of belonging in everyday multilingual team interaction.

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 identifies forms of “belonging work”— continuously, situated, interactional, and discursive effort through which belonging is produced and negotiated in communication (Kuurne & Vieno 2022). Correlations between the different linguistic competence measures and belonging work indicators will then be examined.

Research Questions

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

(2) In what ways, and to what degree, is belonging work performed by speakers during team interaction?

(3) Is there a correlation between language proficiency and belonging work in team interactions and how does it evolve over time?