Exploiting multilingualism to sell a ‘monolingual’ experience: The case of language tourism in Malta
- By Larissa Semiramis Schedel,
- Translated by the author & Katy Highet
Pages 75 to 94
Cite this article
- SCHEDEL, Larissa Semiramis,
- Translated by the author & HIGHET, Katy,
- Schedel, Larissa Semiramis.,
- et al.
- Schedel, L.-S.,
- Translated by the author & Highet, K.
https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.178.0066
Cite this article
- Schedel, L.-S.,
- Translated by the author & Highet, K.
- Schedel, Larissa Semiramis.,
- et al.
- SCHEDEL, Larissa Semiramis,
- Translated by the author & HIGHET, Katy,
https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.178.0066
Notes
-
[1]
To protect the anonymity of my research participants, I use pseudonyms when I refer to people or the school.
-
[2]
All accounts regarding the language policy at the school are based on my fieldnotes or interviews.
-
[3]
Maltese is the national and dominant language of the majority of Malta’s population, who are bilingual with English – the official language – to differing degrees (Vella 2013).
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[4]
The term “edutourism” (a combination of the words “education” and “tourism”) describes trips that are undertaken for educational purposes.
-
[5]
Here, I refer to a perspective of Applied Linguistics, which – in the anglophone tradition – focuses primarily on language learning and teaching (Knapp 2011: 121).
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[6]
«Similar to Heller’s [2010] proposal of the term wordforce, the term is a play on words that is based on the expression main-d’oeuvre (literally handwork), which is used in French to describe manual labor and workforce (mostly in the manufacturing industry), thus inextricably linking it to the working classes.» (Duchêne 2020: 24, Italics in the original)
1. Introduction: A VIP customer service
1 On my first day of fieldwork at the private English language school EnglishSchool’s [1] in Malta, the school director, a German man, introduces me during a team meeting to Isabella, a Brazilian woman who speaks Portuguese, English, Italian and Spanish. Isabella works as student service coordinator and describes her job as emotional and affective labour (Barakos 2022). These language holidays, she remarks, are far from idyllic. Isabella tells me about students who suffer from homesickness; at times, some of them are even aggressive or depressed, and need someone to listen to them or give them a hug. Isabella’s task is to look out for these students. The director, seated next to us, adds that in such emergency cases, it does not make sense to force the students to speak English when they just need to be consoled. This personalised support, he explains, is an important part of EngishSchool’s customer service, adding that for those working in the language tourism industry, it is an advantage to be multilingual. [2] Nonetheless, this raises the question of for whom and in what context multilingualism constitutes an advantage.
2 In Malta, “language tourism” (Yarymovich 2004) is a flourishing business – at least until the beginning of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Since the 1960s, the former British colony – officially bilingual with Maltese and English [3] – has gradually been transformed into a popular destination for language holidays. In 2018, the industry reached its highest number of customers, with more than 87 000 language tourists (Kennedy 2019) looking to enjoy themselves in the Mediterranean while learning English in one of the 40 or so language schools, including EnglishSchool. Besides English classes, these schools offer different types of accommodation (hotel, homestay, shared flat with other students) and a leisure programme (e.g., tours, sports activities, or excursions to the beach or to nightclubs). The programme aims to entertain and facilitate exchanges among the international students, offering them opportunities to practice English as well as to consume “a pleasing sense of belonging to an imagined community of tourists and cosmopolitan global citizens” (Thurlow & Jaworski 2011: 295).
3 In its marketing discourse, EnglishSchool foregrounds the excellence of its prize-winning customer service, which Isabella and the director had mentioned to me, in order to distinguish itself from other schools. The school’s website notes, for example: “The EnglishSchool Experience is about making each student feel special, from the very moment you book a course until months after your departure.” Furthermore, they write: “You are at the centre of everything we do, which means that our focus is always on you.”
4 The student population enrolled at the school is highly heterogeneous: customers come from Japan (15%), Turkey (14%), Brazil (13%), Columbia (8%), South Korea (6%), Italy (5%), Switzerland (7%), France (7%), Russia (4 %), among others (Brochure Adults 2018: 79). Most are in their 20s and 30s, but the school also offers tuition for children and teenagers over the summer months as well as specialised classes for people over 50. Moreover, the customers’ level of English varies greatly, as does their need for “linguistic accommodation” (Atkinson & Coupland 1988) from customer service, meaning that some – but not all – expect the (also internationally diverse) customer service to address them in their own language rather than in English (Carvalho 2021, Wilson 2018).
5 The tasks of customer service include welcoming new students upon their arrival in Malta, organising their orientation on their first day at school, supporting them with visa requests or extensions, booking classes or tourism activities, providing all sorts of information, and dealing with any issues or complaints. Their work is thus primarily one of oral communication, which makes it a particularly important space for a sociolinguistic exploration of the exploitation of multilingual practices as economic resources in the context of tourism, as well as the consequences for the speakers involved (Duchêne 2011; Heller, Pujolar & Duchêne 2016).
6 Language tourism destinations as well as language schools are often imagined as monolingual places where the target language is exclusively spoken (Jang 2020). However, these destinations and schools are in practice linguistically heterogenous, partly because they bring together a large number of international students and workers, and partly due to the preexisting multilingualism of the local population. The institutional language management in language schools has, however, been understudied (see Section 2). As such, this contribution takes the example of customer service in such schools in order to investigate, firstly, which languages are (de)valorised as economic resources in the fabrication of the edutourism [4] experience for learners of English and, secondly, under which conditions and with what consequences these resources get exploited.
7 In what follows, I first discuss scholarship on the commercialization of language tourism products through the lens of “linguistic commodification”, and present my field site. I then present the analysis, through a description of a typical workday for the school’s customer service staff. Drawing on this example of everyday work, I examine which languages get used at which moment and why, in order to identify the linguistic ideologies that undergird the institutional language management. The paper concludes with a discussion of the resulting language regime.
2. The language tourism industry through the lens of linguistic commodification
8 Language tourism (or travel) is a form of educational tourism in which learning a language is the primary or secondary motivation (Iglesias 2016). This kind of tourism has its origins in the educational trips of young aristocrats who travelled across Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, also known as the Grand Tour (Tosi 2020). Today, this form of edutourism combines language classes or language immersion experiences with tourist activities (Yarymowich 2004). The language stays often take place abroad, but at times also in the tourists’ country of origin, either in another linguistic region (see e.g., Petit Cahill 2020) or in a place explicitly designed to offer an immersion experience, such as language villages (Gao 2019; Lee 2011). In this paper, I focus on a language school with international customers as a key institution in the language tourism infrastructure.
9 While scholars of Tourism Studies have been interested in the motivations behind this kind of tourism (see e.g., Drozdzewski 2011), scholars of Applied Linguistics [5] have focused on the effects of language trips on the development of linguistic competencies, on the language learning motivation, or on the identity construction of the learners (for an overview see Pinar 2016).
10 Since the 2000s, sociolinguistic scholars have shown interest in the commodification of language(s), i.e., in the treatment of languages or communicational practices as economic resources with an exchange value (Duchêne 2021). This phenomenon has been explored, amongst others, in the context of tourism (see e.g., Heller, Pujolar & Duchêne 2014) as well as in the context of language teaching (see e.g., Block & Cameron 2002). Combining these two activities, and bringing together people of different (linguistic) origins, the language tourism industry seems to be the context par excellence for the investigation of the management and commodification of languages. However, language schools have rarely served as a field for ethnographic explorations of institutional multilingualism from the perspective of tourism. As such, very little has been written about the process of developing edutouristic products and about the linguistic ideologies prevailing in this industry; i.e. how the touristic as well as linguistic experiences are produced, commercialised and consumed, and with what consequences for those who produce and consume them.
11 Yarymovich (2004) is a notable exception. Focusing on the discourse of language tourism, she analyses the promotional texts of Canadian language schools. This discursive approach, however, does not account for questions of language choice nor practices of linguistic accommodation towards the customers in the marketing. This perspective has been explored by Carvalho (2021), who discusses the linguistic accommodation of the local population towards language tourists as a source of frustration. However, she also demonstrates that the absence of linguistic accommodation is perceived as problematic by the language tourists when encountering language barriers.
12 Most ethnographic sociolinguistic studies of language schools appear to share a focus on the learners’ consumption of the linguistic experience by examining their interactions with teachers, host families or other tourists (see e.g., Gao 2019; Jang 2017; Petit-Cahill 2020). Several studies also investigate the affective labour and language work of teachers in language schools with local clients (see e.g., Barakos 2022). The other staff in these schools, who play a central role in the elaboration of language tourism experiences, have, however, been largely overlooked in the literature. Moreover, very few studies adopt an institutional perspective to study the language policies adopted in language tourism products (with some notable exceptions: Gao 2019; Petit Cahill 2020).
13 In sum, very little is known about the linguistic strategies adopted by language schools to facilitate the interaction with international customers and the commercialisation of their edutouristic products in situ and outside of the classroom. Taking EnglishSchool’s student service as an example, this contribution thus focuses on the language choices of these tourism workers in order to explore which multilingual practices are (de)valorised as economic resources, and hence better understand the political economy of languages in the language tourism industry in Malta.
3. An ethnography of the language tourism industry in Malta
14 This article is based on ethnographic research undertaken in the framework of the project “Language Skills for Sale” (University of Bonn 2018 – present) which examines the development of the language tourism industry and the commodification of English in Malta from a critical sociolinguistic perspective (Boutet & Heller 2007). I draw on fieldwork carried out over six months (April – September 2018) in one of the biggest schools in Malta, namely EnglishSchool.
15 Founded at the beginning of the last century, the school was originally a renowned kindergarten and primary school that catered exclusively to children from British families living in Malta. At this time, the Maltese archipelago was still a Crown colony. Before the arrival of the British in 1800, Italian was largely used by intellectuals, while Maltese had a less prestigious status (Vella 2013). This situation changed during British occupation. The colonial power promoted the use of Maltese at schools to teach English, which thus gradually replaced Italian (Frendo 1975: 24 cited by Vella 2013: 538).
16 In 1962 (two years before Malta gained independence), a Maltese family acquired the school and expanded it to cater to children at secondary level. During this same period, Malta began to welcome the first language tourists. In response to this growing language tourism, the school’s owners saw an opportunity to make a profit also during the summer holidays. As such, they started offering English classes to international students. In 1991, they founded the EnglishSchool which thereafter became one of the biggest private language schools in Malta. In 2004, Malta became a member state of the European Union. European policies of free trade combined with the boom in low-cost airlines facilitated travel as well as labour migration for European citizens, all of which transformed Malta into a truly international place. The success of the EnglishSchool led to it becoming a multinational company with around 20 schools in seven countries, approximately 700 employees and more than 45 000 students per year from around the world.
17 During my fieldwork at the school in Malta, I conducted interviews with the director, students and teachers, and families offering homestays, as well as with staff in the marketing, sales, customer service, leisure and accommodation departments. I also accompanied them during their daily work activities and took fieldnotes of my observations. Furthermore, I collected internal documents as well as marketing material, such as brochures, the website, or promotional videos, and documented the linguistic landscape in the school. I also collected articles about the language teaching industry that appeared in local Maltese newspapers or in the journal The Pie News that reports about the language tourism in Malta on a regular basis.
18 Heller, Pujolar and Duchêne (2014) describe tourism as an ideal context to investigate economic and social transformations in the era of Late Capitalism (notably the commodification of languages in the knowledge and service economies). Characterised by the mobility of people and languages, the language tourism industry uses linguistic resources to stage an imagined linguistic community (Thurlow & Jaworski 2011). This staging of the language of the Other for the purpose of touristic consumption takes place first and foremost during the interactions between tourists and tourism workers. The EnglishSchool’s customer service thus serves as a prime example to explore the linguistic management adopted by the school from a critical sociolinguistic perspective. Following the approach proposed by Boutet (2001) who emphasises the importance of distinguishing prescribed language practices from actual ones, I draw on my ethnographic data to compare discourses on the use of languages circulating at the EnglishSchool with my observations of the actual language work of the student service team. I then offer an analysis of the linguistic ideologies underlying these discourses and practices.
4. Analysis: The management of languages in the language tourism industry
19 For the analysis, I have chosen to narrate procedures that I was able to observe every Monday at the EnglishSchool. Each Monday sees the arrival of new students and the ensuing welcome programme that introduces them to the language policy of the school. The discourses and language practices during this welcome procedure reflect well the different linguistic ideological tensions that characterise the management of languages in the multilingual context of the language tourism industry: on the one hand, the need for linguistic accommodation towards the students to facilitate the consumption of the edutourism product and, on the other, the staging of a global anglophone community to offer an immersion experience.
4.1. Facilitating the consumption of English
20 Example 1: One Monday morning at 8 o’clock: I observe the arrival of a hundred new students. The student service team is waiting behind the reception desks and in the entrance hall to welcome the students arriving at the school and to point them in the right direction. Upon arrival, the students need to check in at the reception, where they are asked to show their passport. The student service takes a picture of them for their student card and gives them a folder with brochures. Most of the students speak English well enough to navigate this check in-process without any problem – the activity remains limited to the exchange of relatively few words, as the following extract of an interaction between a female student and Giulia from the student service shows:
21 Even if this first contact in situ does not require enhanced skills in English, it still represents a moment of stress for certain students who do not yet feel comfortable communicating in English. If any student encounters problems understanding, the student service tries to find a staff member who speaks the student’s language. One time, it is even the school director who quickly offers a translation in Spanish. The language policy is “English first”, and, if this does not work, it is the language of the customer. One example of this is an interaction at reception between Aiko and some Japanese students at reception who appear to have a rather limited level of English. She first speaks to them in English, but immediately switches to Japanese. The students seem to be very relieved.
22 After the check in, the students receive different information concerning the classes and the school life throughout the morning, as we will see in the following section.
23 Example 2: At lunch time, an Italian student returns to the reception. He addresses himself to Giulia, who is of Romanian origin and wears a badge which designates her as student service coordinator. On the badge are also displayed the British, Romanian, and Italian flags in order to symbolise – as in the ideology of “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995) – that she speaks English, Romanian and Italian. The student tells her in Italian that he had trouble understanding the information they received due to his low level of English. Giulia briefly summarises everything he should know so far and reassures him by mentioning that many of her colleagues also speak Italian. She introduces him directly to Isabella, who is passing by the reception at that moment, and tells him that he can also turn to her whenever he has a question.
24 Example 3: A little later, an Italian tourist enters the school. He is interested in the school’s courses and would like to receive some information. Giulia speaks to him in Italian:
25 These three examples demonstrate that the interactions between students and the student service team take place in English, but also in the first languages of the students. The school exploits the multilingualism of this “parole d’oeuvre” [6] (Duchêne 2011) of the student service team to guarantee a successful start and the smooth operation of the language stay (example 1 & 2), to respond to the needs of those learners with lower skills (example 1 & 2) and to sell their products in situ (example 3). The employment of a multilingual staff facilitates the customers’ access to the edutourism products, which some of them would otherwise not be able to consume due to the language barrier. The school director explains to me that only a few students book their stay individually through the school’s multilingual website. Most of them use the service of travel agents who speak their languages, and they also expect to have a contact person at the school who speaks their language. It is therefore to the multilingual team of the student service that these students turn. The level of English, and consequently the need for a service in their language, varies a lot between the different markets. Furthermore, the constellation of markets can change rather quickly.
26 In order to ensure a permanent pool of student service workers who speak the languages of the currently most important markets, the school recruits its employees, amongst others, among its own students.
27 That is how Tatiana, a woman from Moldavia who had grown up in Russia, started working for the school. She was looking for a job to finance her language stay at the EnglishSchool, when the school, who itself was looking for a person who would be able to communicate with Russian-speaking parents, offered her the opportunity to work with the young learners. Later, Tatiana would begin working with the student service, in charge of adult learners. She explained to me that a stay abroad of one or two weeks is oftentimes quite expensive for Russian-speaking customers who have, furthermore, high expectations regarding the progress that they will make in this short time. At times, they are also shocked by the liberal approach to learning as they are used to a different style of teaching. When they complain, Tatiana has to act as linguistic and cultural broker to convince them of the quality of the learning/ teaching methods employed by EnglishSchool.
28 Tatiana’s story resembles those of many of her international colleagues from the student service. Most of them had themselves been students at EnglishSchool and had been recruited because of their specific linguistic repertoire. The first languages of these students thus become a recruitment criterion and an economic resource in this anglophone world. This resource, however, has a fluctuating value in the face of the dynamics of the markets. Only certain languages of their multilingual repertoire get valorised, namely those of the most important markets. Giulia and Tatiana never really have a chance to use their Romanian skills because none of the students speak Romanian. Furthermore, the mobilisation of their multilingual repertoire is limited to specific moments and interlocutors and remains prohibited and banned for the rest of the time, as we will see in the following section.
4.2. Responding to the pursuit of immersion: The staging of a global anglophone community
29 After the check in, students must pass a language test to determine their level of English, following which they receive their timetable and are assigned to a class. While the academic staff are evaluating the tests, a young Maltese teacher introduces the new students to the learning and teaching methods that are employed by the school as follows:
Imagine that English is a swimming pool. Dive in it. Use English 24h a day. Speak in English, listen to music in English, use Facebook in English. If you do this all the time, you will think in English. The biggest problems that students have at EnglishSchool are that they make friends with people from their home country. In my class – no dictionaries, because if you translate, you think in your language. I think it is a great pity – you know pity – shame – that you are paying a lot of money. You waste your money if you speak your language. Forget your language. Your language is finished now. I see a big difference in the progress of the students that are speaking in English all the time.
31 The teacher refers to the method of immersion which she explains using the metaphor of diving into the language. In order to obtain total immersion, she encourages the students not to use their first languages anymore. All interactions and activities need to take place in the target language. In this immersion discourse, the teacher mobilises the logic of investment (Darvin & Norton 2015), which positions the students as investors and makes them responsible for their own learning progress (Schedel 2022). In her experience, the students who follow this immersion rule and who use exclusively English during their stay would make the biggest progress. She also implies that it is the students’ fault if they do not advance as quickly as expected. This liberal conception of learning negates other factors of differentiation among the students (such as capacity to learn, motivation, etc.) as well as any other external influence on the language learning progress (ibid.). In order to stop speaking their own language, the teacher recommends that the students no longer socialise with students from the same (linguistic) background – who thus become personae non-gratae as learning partners, but also as potential friends – and advises them to seek out contact with people of other nationalities. In this way, the students are classified and hierarchised as (il)legitimate interlocutors (see also Jang 2020).
32 The immersion discourse also appears in the school’s marketing and in the interviews that I conducted with students, especially when they explained why they had chosen to come to Malta. Indeed, these students are convinced that immersion is the most efficient learning method and expect to practice English in Malta the whole time. The immersion discourse oftentimes depicts the country’s population, where the target language is spoken, as a homogenous group of “native speakers” (Jang 2020). However, the learners spend most of the time of their stay at school with other learners and not with the local population – a population which, moreover, is also very international and/or multilingual. In order to remain within the logic of immersion, the EnglishSchool presents the multilingual student body as a global community whose language of communication is English (Kubota 2011). According to this logic, the plurality of the students’ nationalities figures as a learning resource. We find, for instance, the following comment on the school’s website in the section on the learning methods employed:
Great Nationality Mix
The wide range of nationalities you’ll be sharing your classes (sic!) means that you will not only be practising your English, (sic!) but learning about and learning how to interact with people from all over the world – not just enhancing your language but developing the Global Competencies so important for building an international career. And you’ll have made friends from around the world.
34 This passage constructs the idea of a global community that reunites international people thanks to English – a language that is also associated with professional success in this community (Park 2011). Learning English at the language school is presented to the learners as the key to becoming a member of this imagined community (Jang 2017; Kubota 2011). The promise of social and professional success that the command of English would make possible is also nourished by success stories (Park 2010). This is the case, for example, when the manager of the student service, a British woman, introduces the newly arrived students to the school’s staff. She starts with the director and describes him as follows:
He is the most important person because he is the boss. Can you guess where he is from? He is German and he speaks Spanish as his wife is from South America, and he speaks obviously also English. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be here. He started his career in the UK, travelled the world, and came to Malta then.
36 By mentioning his origin, his family, and his international trajectory as well as his multilingual competencies, she presents him as a cosmopolitan person who has succeeded in his professional life thanks to the command of English. The manager’s discourse also echoes the school’s slogan which describes their mission as “Helping students succeed in a global community”. This slogan uses English as a synonym for success (Park 2010, 2011) and describes it as the language of this imagined global community (Jang 2017; Kubota 2011; Lee 2011), of which the director appears to be a member.
37 After the presentation of the staff, the manager gives further advice to the students on how to improve their English skills during their stay. She invites them, for instance, to use the library and attend the free workshops such as the “Listening Lab”, and concludes by reminding them to use English all the time:
But the most important thing is that you speak. I have seen that you have already found some friends from your home country. But you are here to speak English to international people. You have flown all the way; you have come all the way to that beautiful island in the Mediterranean to speak English. Make sure you speak English all the time. We have a lot of staff that is speaking many languages. But at least try to speak in English. If it is not possible, they will speak to you in your language. But at least try.
39 In this reminder, the manager describes the students but also the staff as international people who speak different languages. At the same time, she prescribes English as the only legitimate language (Bourdieu 1977) that should be spoken and justifies this, just as the Maltese teacher had done in her earlier immersion discourse, with a cost-benefit analysis (Schedel 2022). She reminds the students that they have travelled from far away to come to Malta, implying that they have also made a certain financial investment (Darvin & Norton Peirce 2015). They should, therefore, speak English all the time to ensure the profitability of their investment. Although the manager does not use the word “immersion”, she still refers to it implicitly through her instruction to speak English all the time. By mentioning the multilingual repertoire of the school’s staff, she assures the students that they can find a contact person who speaks their languages if necessary. However, at the same time, she asks them to avoid this. This code of conduct is not only imposed on the students, but also on the members of the student service, and serves the purpose of rendering the school a monolingual, anglophone place (Petit Cahill 2020).
40 In this regard, I was able to observe how two Brazilian students turned to Isabella to book an airport transfer. In this interaction, Isabella speaks to them in English only, even when they show her a text message in Portuguese and start to translate it for her. In response, she simply signals to them that she has understood the message. She speaks slowly and clearly. The students do not manage to make themselves understood immediately, but after some explanations they manage to make the booking entirely in English. This booking was not an emergency case and the two students’ English was good enough to make themselves understood. Isabella’s persistence, as she refused to switch to Portuguese, turned this short exchange into a situation where the students’ learning potential becomes a successfully achieved conversation for the students.
41 The marketing discourse that promises that the students will encounter other students with many different nationalities with whom they will be able to speak only in English is potentially problematic, as it erases not only the other languages that are spoken, but also the fact that some of these students still do not speak English well enough to communicate. This discourse is also responsible for the students’ disappointment when they realise that many of the students and even the school’s employees come from the same country as themselves and speak their language(s). The director explains to me that it is for this reason that members of the student service must not speak their languages among colleagues and in front of the students. Apparently, there were some students’ complaints about the school’s employees who did not speak in English. Therefore, he states, it is important to remind the school’s staff to speak in English.
42 This statement corresponds to my observations which reveal a form of surveillance of the staging of an entirely anglophone community and place. If some of the employees speak their languages with colleagues or with me, they are automatically admonished by other colleagues. For instance, when I addressed myself once at the reception in German to a member of the student service who comes from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, he replied in English, and Giulia explained to me that he does not like German – a polite way to show me that German is not accepted here, especially since she knows that I am able to communicate in English. Another time, when I addressed myself again at the reception to a German trainee, the Maltese cleaning lady who passed by at this moment urged us to speak in English. Even the cleaning staff, who are normally not in direct contact with the students, have integrated this language policy and ensure that everyone respects it.
43 It is important to mention that these two incidents took place at the reception, which – following Goffman (1959, see also Petit Cahill 2020) – can be described as “front stage”, because there is normally an audience, embodied by the students, that consumes and evaluates the staging of an anglophone space. While at reception I heard members of the student service speak only in English among themselves, in other places where there were no students around, I was able to observe the use of other languages. This was the case, for example, when a Maltese member of the student service switched from English to Maltese while speaking with another Maltese colleague in an office to which students do not have access. These multilingual practices are, however, well hidden in spaces or moments that would be considered as “back stage” (cf. Goffman 1959).
44 Just as the use of Maltese was historically often prohibited in the schools for Maltese children during and even after the British occupation of Malta (Camilleri Grima 2013), or was only used to spread the language of the colonial force (Frendo 1975 cited by Vella 2013: 538), once again Maltese does not have a legitimate place (Bourdieu 1977) in today’s English language schools in the context of language tourism, and remains confined to the background.
5. Conclusion: Multilingualism in service of the commodification of an ostensible monolingual experience
45 Through the example of the student service, this article has investigated which multilingual practices constitute an economic resource to serve language tourists and to fabricate language tourism experiences, in order to get a better understanding of the consequences of the exploitation of multilingualism in the English language tourism industry in Malta.
46 The comparison between the discourses on the official language policy and the actual language practices at the school reveal several contradictions:
47 Firstly, the principal of “the customer is always right” already includes certain tensions: On the one hand, the students are seeking an immersion experience, and will complain if they hear languages other than English. The use of English and the omission of Maltese and other languages thus serves the construction of an imaginary of the school as monolingual anglophone space and ideal context to learn English (Petit Cahill 2020). On the other hand, the ideologies of immersion and of English as language of success in an imagined global community (Park 2011) contradict the language competencies of certain students with a low level of skills, who require a service in their language, as they would otherwise not be able to navigate the daily life of the school nor consume its products. Their languages of origin are thus exploited through the multilingual repertoire of the student service team to render the product accessible and to satisfy the needs of those learners who do not yet feel at ease in English.
48 However, responding to them in their languages requires staff to conceal this from the other students who wish to exclusively hear English. This hidden mobilisation of multilingual practises serves not only the commodification of English and the maximization of the school’s profit, but it also contributes to the preservation of a neocolonial linguistic regime with regard to Maltese (Phillipson 1992), and reinforces a “monolingual habitus” in a multilingual learning context (Gogolin 1994).
49 Secondly, there are also divergences between discourses on the propagated use of languages and the actual language practices. Despite the claimed “English only” policy, the members of the student service do interact multilingually with customers as well as with colleagues. The challenge for the student service team lies thus in recognizing the situations (emergency vs. learning), spaces (front vs. back stage) and (il)legitimate interlocutors (students with good English skills vs. with difficulties of comprehension) for the “acceptable” usage of their multilingual repertoire and for the successful navigation of the tensions emerging from the different linguistic ideologies in play (the staging of a global community for immersion purposes vs. the requirement of linguistic accommodation).
6. Addenda: The circulation of language workers in the service sector as a consequence of the pandemic
50 The Covid-19 pandemic hit Malta hard, as tourism represents one of its most important industries. Travel restrictions and lockdowns dramatically reduced the sale of language tourism products. Private language schools tried to adapt their programme to the new economic and sanitary conditions by introducing virtual classes. However, their business had been based on the touristic attraction of the Maltese archipelago and they suffered from the absence of tourists. Consequently, the schools were forced to dismiss many employees and some schools even had to close for good. The student service workers were among the first to lose their jobs. Isabella and several of her colleagues managed to find employment in the customer service of a gambling company, which caters to markets all over Europe and thus requires multilingual employees. It is thus not only the markets that change quickly, but even the basic working conditions for this kind of tourism. In the face of the pandemic and its consequences on language tourism, the future of language schools and their employees remains uncertain.
Acknowledgement
51 This research was supported by the Office for Gender Equality of the University of Bonn (Maria von Linden Programme). The author thanks the editors and the reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript, Carmen Klein for transcribing parts of the data, Marie Leroy and Philippe Humbert for proofreading the French version of the manuscript, as well as Katy Highet for her precious help with the English translation of the French article.
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