Abstract:

This paper elucidates the self-reported narratives in the acquisition of Lingua Franca English (LFE) by five purposefully selected transnational managers in the global tourism and hospitality industry. Participants were, at the time of this study, sojourners in the Emirates, a multilingual setting where Arabic is the official language but where English is the default lingua franca (Siemund et al., 2021). All participants had prior and continuing transnational job mobility as an expectation, and perhaps a condition, of employment. Like the transnational domestic worker migrants to the region as portrayed by Lorente (2017), language is a central resource in participants’ transformation into transnational workers; unlike them, however, participants in this study are transnational white collar managerial-level employees of international hotel and hospitality groups. To provide global representation, participants were selected from diverse, non-Anglophone backgrounds in Europe, Asia, and South America. Given that language is ‘a practice as well as a resource that can have both symbolic value and exchange value in a market economy’ (Duchêne et al., 2013, p. 5), this paper investigates how engagement with LFE has been instrumental in participants’ self-driven transformation into transnationally mobile managers. Narrative inquiry method was employed to investigate the ways in which LFE is instrumental in participants’ creation and maintenance of individual, agentive, and transnational self-identities as self-initiated expatriates. A particular focus of this study is participants’ reported adoption of self-directed independent learning strategies for acquiring English for international mobility.

Keywords:

Lingua franca English, language and transnational mobility, self-directed language learning, English and international tourism.