9 March 2016

Celia Roberts (King’s College London)

‘I had to spoon-feed him’: Linguistic penalties, migration, and the job interview.

Interviews still remain supreme in access to employment in all but the lowest-paid and most precarious of jobs. ‘Linguistic penalties’ are the product of the job interview’s discursive regimes and the habitual communicative resources that migrants bring to the interview. I will talk about how these discursive regimes create linguistic penalties and try to identify the complex mix of communicative resources used by candidates which exclude them from the higher – tier labour market. The evaluation of candidates in the ‘wash – up’ sessions, where the final decision making is done, gives a window onto the language ideologies on which interviews draw. The interview as a cultural and language test is (largely) hidden from candidates but plays a significant role in the outcomes for the migrants and in the production of inequality in the labour market.

Celia Roberts is Professor Emerita in sociolinguistics at King’s College London in the Centre for Language, Discourse and Communication. Her interests are in language and cultural processes in the workplace, health and other institutional contexts, their practical relevance to real world situations of disadvantage and in research methods in ethnography and linguistics. Her publications include: Language and Discrimination 1992 ; Achieving Understanding 1996, Talk, Work and Institutional Order 1999, Performance Features in Clinical Skills Assessment (with Atkins and Hawthorne) 2014 and Linguistic Penalties (forthcoming).