1. Professional Identities of French Lx Economic Immigrants: Perceptions from a Local French-Speaking Community.
- Author
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Beaulieu, Suzie, Bejarano, Javier, French, Leif Michael, and Reinke, Kristin
- Subjects
IMMIGRANTS ,LANGUAGE & languages ,ECONOMIC development ,FRENCH language ,SOCIOLINGUISTICS - Abstract
Communicative expertise in the host society's dominant language is central to newcomers' socio-professional integration. To date, SLA research has largely ignored laypeople's perspectives about Lx communicative expertise, though they are the ultimate judges of real-life interactional success. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that laypeople may base their judgments of Lx speech not only on linguistic criteria, but also on extralinguistic factors such as gender and language background. To document laypeople perspectives, we investigated the professional characteristics attributed to four ethnolinguistic groups of French Lx economic immigrants (Spanish, Chinese, English and Farsi) who were nearing completion of the government-funded French language training program in Quebec City, Canada. We asked L1 naïve listeners (N = 49) to evaluate spontaneous speech excerpts, similar in terms of content and speech qualities, produced by a man and a woman from each target group. After they listened to each audio excerpt, we asked listeners to select the characteristics they associated with that person from a list of the most frequent professional qualities found in job advertisements. Data analysis showed that few Lx users were perceived as having strong communication skills in French. Logistic regression revealed no significant relationships between language group, gender, communicative effectiveness, and professional characteristics. However, there were significant associations between communicative effectiveness with the following characteristics: can work independently, can relate to others, is dynamic, has a sense of initiative, and shows leadership skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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