Linguistic Gains in Exchange for Work: The (Hollow?) Promise of Immersion in the Voluntourism Industry

Over the last 30 years, the language travel industry has evolved into a thriving business in the Mediterranean island state of Malta, whose population is bilingual with English and Maltese. Officially, about 80,000 learners of all ages consume English language classes in one of the around 40 language schools every year. However, the real number of language tourists that are seeking immersion experience to boost their 'linguistic capital' seems to be much higher. Many young people, who have lost their trust in teaching methods or who simply cannot afford one of the pricy learning packages of the schools, decide to get a summer job in Malta's tourism industry to profit from the 'total immersion' into this (apparently) Anglophone work context. Since there is a lack of critical ethnographic sociolinguistic accounts of the immersion industry outside mainstream education and especially of language learning at work (Yates, 2017), this contribution sheds light on the understudied topic of immersion discourses, practices, and subjectivities in the context of language-motivated voluntourism. By drawing on marketing material for work-and-learn-a-language-sojourns, on interviews with international voluntourists (aged from 18 to 33) as well as on observations of their daily work routine as housekeepers in a hostel, I explore how learning English through immersion by working abroad is imagined and promoted, occurs – or not, and generates what kind of (linguistic or other) 'gains' and for whom. The aim of my contribution is to unpack the extreme precariousness of the learners' work situation and to uncover how these immersion experiences are governed by neoliberal rationalities.

Reference

Yates, Linda. 2017. Language Learning on the Job. In Bernadette Vine (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Language in the Workplace, 425‑435. New York: Routledge.