International students and their raciolinguistic sensemaking of aural employability in Canadian universities

Abstract

Abstract International students in Canadian universities are deemed valuable immigrants for the Canadian nation as they are equipped with formal credentials easily recognizable for local employers. Despite having desired technical skills and knowledge, the English of these students is perceived as hindering their ability to voice this expertise. This then forces international students to think about how language can affect their employability during their studies. Drawing on a narrative analysis of the experiences of 14 international students in Ontario and focussing on speech accent, this article explores how they make sense of aural employability, the ability to be heard as employable, through participating in Canadian higher education. The students connected aural employability with ‘sounding Canadian’ through raciolinguistic sensemaking, a type of sensemaking that interprets the linguistic world with various ideologies of whiteness. Such sensemaking speaks to how Canadian universities, as sites of workplace language learning, cannot be divorced from the white settler logics that pervade these institutions.