Construction of Expat Workplace Identities: Japanese Language Teachers in Istanbul

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

While multilingualism as a field has become more diverse in terms of subjects of study, there has been a slow but steady interest in the growing number of expatriates who work in different industries in their host countries (Hechanova, Beehr and Christiansen 2003). For these expatriates, adjusting to a new workplace in a different cultural context is a daily challenge (Shin, Morgeson and Campion 2007). In the last two decades or so, research on expats has also focused on those working in different capacities on campuses of rapidly internationalizing universities (Altbach and Knight, 2007) One line of this work concerns expatriates working in non-Western universities. As in the case of the Western settings, there is a limited amount of research on business/professional communities elsewhere in the world due to limited access to workplaces for data collection (Duff 2008; Roberts 2010). There is even much less focus on ethnographic study designs in this context (Gabler, Andrea, 2015).







Partially responding to this gap, the purpose of this paper is to focus on an under-studied group of expats, namely, Japanese language teachers working at a highly prestigious EMI state university campus in Istanbul. Japanese language courses started to be offered in this university in 1988 with one Japanese teacher, and in time, as the demand for Japanese classes increased, the number of Japanese language teachers has multiplied, as well. As part of the project “Contemporary Linguistic Diversity in Istanbul,” this paper will present preliminary findings from our two-year-long linguistic ethnographic project. Drawing on data from observations, interviews, and audio-recordings of naturally occurring conversations across the Japanese, Turkish and English languages in a multilingual workplace, the paper will particularly focus on the construction of expat workplace identities of a non-traditional expat community in a non-traditional context of a Western-oriented university in a non-Western country.

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