Audio file MITN Webinar - Perceptions of workplace soft skills in a vocational ESL program.mp4 Transcript 00:00:02 Prof Jo Angouri This I will. I will remember that we need to say this so. 00:00:07 Prof Jo Angouri It's just like. 00:00:07 Helena Wall I I have inquired as to whether we can integrate a sort of teams claxon, but apparently not. 00:00:13 Prof Jo Angouri I think we should. It should be something like that comes automatically up on the screen or something. 00:00:18 Prof Jo Angouri So anyway, thanks. 00:00:20 Helena Wall Over to you, Julie. 00:00:22 Dr Julie Kerekes Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. And uh, I mentioned to you, Helena, yesterday that I had a another meeting in an hour, but it was cancelled. 00:00:32 Dr Julie Kerekes So I just, I know I'm figuring on talking for about 3540 minutes or or maybe less if it gets. 00:00:42 Dr Julie Kerekes To be too much. But if if that works for you, that's what I'll plan on. 00:00:49 Helena Wall That would be great. 00:00:50 Dr Julie Kerekes Thank you very much. 00:00:53 Dr Julie Kerekes In recent decades, pragmatic competence has been recognised as a critical component of language proficiency, as I'm sure most of you know. 00:01:01 Dr Julie Kerekes And despite being more difficult to identify and teach than many structural aspects of language such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, it is gaining recognition as an important component. 00:01:12 Dr Julie Kerekes The ability to convey a message effectively means that beyond its literal and transactional meanings, the message must produce a desirable response and the intended impression. 00:01:23 Dr Julie Kerekes The message conveyed is determined not only by what is said, but also by who says it to whom, for what purpose, and in what context in places of employment, migrant language learners needs to communicate effectively with their superiors, and coworkers have been recognised as vital to their success in obtaining and keeping jobs in their new countries of residence. 00:01:48 Dr Julie Kerekes In recent decades. 00:01:51 Dr Julie Kerekes Wait, sorry. 00:01:54 Dr Julie Kerekes Here we go. 00:01:56 Dr Julie Kerekes Miscommunication in intercultural interactions is potentially exacerbated in instances involving speakers with different levels of proficiency in a given language and cultural norms and expectations also play a part in some of the areas that that learners sometimes. 00:02:16 Dr Julie Kerekes Find challenging, such as the politeness, directness and appropriateness. 00:02:22 Dr Julie Kerekes Typical features of pragmatics, instruction in language classes address how to modify face threatening acts such as requests, also building rapport through common ground with one's interlocutor and recognising cultural differences in order to alleviate potential areas of misunderstanding. 00:02:43 Dr Julie Kerekes Awareness of the importance of interpersonal skills in workplace communication is evident in the numerous terms used around the globe. 00:02:50 Dr Julie Kerekes To refer to this slippery concept called horizontal skills, according to Joe, in Greece finish Ness in Finland, skills in being human. 00:03:03 Dr Julie Kerekes In Malaysia, social competencies or human skills in Hungarian and the term soft skills, which has been become ubiquitous in China and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, North America and around the globe in human resources settings, as well as among lay people discussing work. 00:03:23 Dr Julie Kerekes Although vaguely defined, soft skills generally include one's adaptability and the ability to problem solve, collaborate, resolve conflicts, empathise, negotiate, and persuade in both written and spoken modes of workplace communication. 00:03:43 Dr Julie Kerekes So the objectives of today's presentation is to examine perceptions of soft skills in a Canadian vocational training setting and to understand some of the ideologies behind the use and application of this term and its effect on employment seekers who are. 00:04:00 Dr Julie Kerekes Students in this vocational training setting. 00:04:07 Dr Julie Kerekes 22% of Canada's population is immigrants, many of whom have a dominant language which is neither English nor French, which are candidates to official languages. Language skills but not soft skills per say, have received tremendous attention by Immigration Services. 00:04:25 Dr Julie Kerekes Which view inadequate proficiency in the official languages as a potential barrier to new immigrants successful settlement. 00:04:32 Dr Julie Kerekes Canada's federally funded adult English as a second or additional language programmes span a wide range of ways to address newcomers. Language needs from link, which is language instruction for newcomers to Canada. 00:04:45 Dr Julie Kerekes To enhance language training, which is a sector specific language course for students with Advanced English proficiency, settlement organisations also offer occupation specific language training, a bridging programme lost. 00:05:01 Dr Julie Kerekes Right, a bridging programme which is for immigrants who are skilled in a specific professional field, but who are perceived to need to develop job related English language competencies. 00:05:16 Dr Julie Kerekes My project takes place at a settlement organisation for which the pseudonym I use is Mesa Centre. It's a large, well established social services organisation in Ontario, Canada and one of its main programmes is immigrant settlement which helps immigrants join the Canadian job market. 00:05:34 Dr Julie Kerekes It it provides counselling employment, bridging programmes for internationally educated professionals, mentoring and English language instruction. 00:05:42 Dr Julie Kerekes This study began as a collaborative project between Laura and the manager of Mesa Centre and Me, a professor of applied linguistics. 00:05:50 Dr Julie Kerekes Laura had approached me before the project began in order to explore how soft skills could be taught more effectively to the newcomers in Mesa centres. ESL courses. She wanted to identify areas for growth. 00:06:02 Dr Julie Kerekes In Macy's curriculum, in order to better meet students needs and market demands. 00:06:14 Dr Julie Kerekes And meanwhile I was creating a graduate course called IWC Intercultural Workplace communication. Excuse me. 00:06:27 Dr Julie Kerekes Over 50% of our Masters in education students or Med students have international student status. 00:06:35 Dr Julie Kerekes And while the majority of our domestic students are able to gain teaching and other practical experience related to language education by working part time during their studies, international students aren't permitted to do so. 00:06:47 Dr Julie Kerekes So one of my objectives in developing this course was to offer the Med students the experience of collecting and analysing authentic empirical data, as well as opportunities. 00:06:56 Dr Julie Kerekes To observe ESL inspection in a Canadian context and the outcome of these combined goals was the creation of this course intercultural workplace communication. I'm sorry about my voice. It's not usually this scratchy. 00:07:11 Dr Julie Kerekes In this course for their final assignment, students were given choices to one of which was to carry out an empirical study at Mesa Centre in accordance with guidelines that I provided, which had been approved ahead of time by the Research Ethics Board. 00:07:26 Dr Julie Kerekes And in the end, 15 of the 22 students enrolled in the course chose that option and became novice researchers. 00:07:36 Dr Julie Kerekes The collaboration offered me an opportunity to create a curriculum which would enable my image students to obtain hands on empirical research experience and a way to apply my research to immigrant services. 00:07:50 Dr Julie Kerekes And the collaborative project therefore sought insights about both Mesa centres, teaching practises and the learning experiences of my students. 00:08:01 Dr Julie Kerekes So together with Laura, I set up an apprenticeship collaboration to support Mason's soft skills instruction, through which my students became contributing. 00:08:11 Dr Julie Kerekes Student researchers. 00:08:20 Dr Julie Kerekes The objectives of the project that's called the twinning project were for my students to gain research experience and to apply their findings to practical recommendations and from Mesa Centre staff to be able to make informed decisions. 00:08:36 Dr Julie Kerekes On the basis of the data analysed by my students and by me. 00:08:41 Dr Julie Kerekes So first, my students who were interested in participating in this project wrote statements describing their interests and professional and educational backgrounds, and then together. 00:08:52 Dr Julie Kerekes Laura and I. 00:08:53 Dr Julie Kerekes Reviewed those statements and we interviewed each of the students and placed them in teams of two to three according to their qualifications and interests, these student. 00:09:02 Dr Julie Kerekes Research teams were then matched with Mesa Centre language courses and their respective instructors, and these became their sites of data collection. 00:09:11 Dr Julie Kerekes They received some training from me in data collection and analysis in the course that I was teaching, and then their research teams designed each research team designed its respective mini study and collected a variety of data addressing soft soft skills. They observed Mesa Centre classroom practises. They interviewed message. 00:09:31 Dr Julie Kerekes Language instructors and some of the English language students. They led focus groups with the staff and administrators at Mesa, and they examined the documented curriculum used by mesas instructors, according to each team's particular research interests. So they didn't all do all of those things, but they each created. 00:09:48 Dr Julie Kerekes A mini study which did some of those things. 00:09:51 Dr Julie Kerekes And they subsequently analysed their respective sets of data and wrote them up as research papers for their term projects. 00:09:58 Dr Julie Kerekes Their findings, as well as a summary report by me, were shared with Laura, the manager at Mesa Centre, and they were utilised by Mesa staff in their subsequent design of an online curriculum for. 00:10:08 Dr Julie Kerekes Teaching soft skills. 00:10:13 Dr Julie Kerekes The collaboration resulted in a rich set of classroom observation and interview data. So together with my then graduate assistant Jean Sinclair, I created a plan to examine the IWCO students analysis in order to better understand the role of soft skills instruction in the. 00:10:31 Dr Julie Kerekes Ideologies of immigrant success conveyed by Mesa Centre to its clients. 00:10:38 Dr Julie Kerekes We reviewed the original data collected by the graduate student teams and we completed and refined our data transcriptions and coded the data into emergent themes through an iterative and collaborative process. 00:10:49 Dr Julie Kerekes We used an inductive analytics strategy that was both grounded in the data and conceptually connected to literature on the topic of normative instructional practises. 00:10:58 Dr Julie Kerekes In the SSL settings. 00:10:59 Dr Julie Kerekes We sought to understand the emic definitions, usages, applications, and rationales for the importance attributed to soft skills instruction at Mesa. 00:11:09 Dr Julie Kerekes Our resulting analysis responds to the student researchers data analysis, which concluded that effective soft skills instruction was occurring at Mesa and that there was also room for improvement. 00:11:21 Dr Julie Kerekes And we we investigated the roles, perceptions and implications of soft skills and instructions as the largest and most linguistically diverse province in Canada. 00:11:30 Dr Julie Kerekes And as the province that receives the greatest number of new immigrants each year, Ontario is an appropriate place for us to seek evidence or counter evidence in relation to gloss 2013. 00:11:41 Dr Julie Kerekes Claim that Canada's adult ESL programmes are vehicle. 00:11:45 Dr Julie Kerekes Quote for assimilating immigrants into the norms of the dominant culture. 00:11:50 Dr Julie Kerekes Furthermore, we investigate whether the data substantiate Hawks idea that Canadian adult ESL classes classes encourage learners to take responsibility for moulding themselves through language and soft skills into desirable workers for Canadian employers. 00:12:08 Dr Julie Kerekes So we use a critical lens to examine how adult ESL courses in the Canadian context conceptualise and teach vocational language skills to recent immigrants. 00:12:20 Dr Julie Kerekes Specifically, we ask, how are soft skills? 00:12:23 Dr Julie Kerekes Wait a minute. Let me move on to the next. 00:12:26 Dr Julie Kerekes Specifically, we asked how are soft skills, customer service skills and fitting into the Canadian workplace conceptualise and address at Mesa Centre? 00:12:41 Dr Julie Kerekes Before I go further, I'd like to acknowledge my co-author of our upcoming paper on this project, Jean Sinclair, and also express my appreciation for my former graduate students and the staff at Mesa Centre who participated in this project. They were really great to work with and we. 00:12:55 Dr Julie Kerekes All learned a lot. 00:13:01 Dr Julie Kerekes Scholars such as Hawke have posited that an assimilationist mentality underlines underlines Canadian ESL Soft Skills instruction, which Hawke argues teaches amorphous behavioural competencies to remediate and augment a purported lack and perceived deficit in the newcomer. 00:13:20 Dr Julie Kerekes In one of her writings, Hawke described an ESL instructional context whose goal was to teach Canadian newcomers to demonstrate that they are not really that. 00:13:30 Dr Julie Kerekes Teaching immigrants soft skills was to wash out this foreignness, not the visibles, but the verbal and nonverbal. Because employers don't want to experience this sense of foreignness, she wrote. 00:13:46 Dr Julie Kerekes One book, which is often referenced by vocational ESL instructors. 00:13:49 Dr Julie Kerekes Is oops, sorry. 00:13:59 Dr Julie Kerekes Sorry about that. Uh. 00:14:01 Dr Julie Kerekes One book, which is often referenced. 00:14:03 Dr Julie Kerekes Is a book an ESO? 00:14:06 Dr Julie Kerekes Book for vocational ESL instructors by LaRoche and Yang and who? And they discussed the concept of hierarchized versus egalitarian cultures in cryptos in. 00:14:18 Dr Julie Kerekes Quotes Laoshan Rutherford's 2007 book connects soft skills with his purported dichotomy, claiming that hierarchical people tend to be obedient as their managers to make decisions and prioritise tasks based on the position and title of the delegating. 00:14:36 Dr Julie Kerekes Person and in contrast, they suggest that egalitarian people are more likely to be empowered, prioritise tasks based on urgency and importance, and feel relatively comfortable disagreeing with their boss. The field of social linguistics has been at the vanguard of critiquing such dichotomization. 00:14:53 Dr Julie Kerekes And our very own Joe Angoori has been at the head of this emphasising social worlds as not static, but instead constantly evolving and becoming through language. 00:15:10 Dr Julie Kerekes The attribution of soft skills to Canada's purported western, non hierarchical workplace culture is echoed in the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers 2014 Research report on internationally trained engineers, which states. 00:15:26 Dr Julie Kerekes Internationally, trained engineers have challenges fitting into a Canadian workplace culture therapy. There appears to be a perception that many ITE's may have acquired their experience in more traditional, hierarchical workplaces. 00:15:39 Dr Julie Kerekes Consequently, they may not have the soft skills needed for working in a team. Many Canadian employers seem to require clarity around how non Canadian experience, which they explicitly or implicitly equate with traditional hierarchies, produce the right fit for a Canadian organisation that uses a team model for engineering work. 00:15:58 Dr Julie Kerekes This statement suggests that internationally trained professionals may lack a capacity for teamwork, and importantly, that such a purported lack is sufficient grounds to deny employment. 00:16:11 Prof Jo Angouri So since I. 00:16:12 Dr Julie Kerekes Was originally approached to help Mesa with their soft skills of curricula. 00:16:16 Dr Julie Kerekes I want to now address how they define soft skills. 00:16:20 Dr Julie Kerekes But the interview and focus group data suggests that Mesa staff are not aligned in their articulation of what soft skills are and are not. 00:16:28 Dr Julie Kerekes They do agree, in their view of soft skills as a component of English language competence, which can and should be addressed across all levels of ESL. 00:16:36 Dr Julie Kerekes And Laura illustrates this point by presenting examples of soft skills that can be addressed in beginning ESL courses. And she says what is OK to ask in certain situations, body language, eye contact, what's considered to be polite in Canada, showing initiative now that can be broken down to a very, very basic level. She values students willingness to express their opinions and make suggestions. 00:16:59 Dr Julie Kerekes Which she sees as aspects of pragmatic competence in the workplace. 00:17:07 Dr Julie Kerekes Roma, one of message ESL instructors, attributes soft skills to cultural fit and also points out discrepancies in definitions of soft skills, and she says I have a problem with soft skills because everybody defines it differently. 00:17:20 Dr Julie Kerekes My Bible for teaching ELT is Lionel La Roche and he defines soft skills as cultural fit. He gives a very clear. 00:17:27 Dr Julie Kerekes Definition. What is it exactly that students don't know? They don't know what they don't know, especially culturally, how they define it. So what I teach, I call it culturally fitting. 00:17:36 Dr Julie Kerekes Skills, not soft skills. 00:17:38 Dr Julie Kerekes In essence, soft skills are equated by Laura and some of her staff with the ability to do things the Canadian way, as demonstrated in her description of the pedagogical approach of Ron, one of Mason's teachers, and Laura said he basically told me he weaves soft skills into most of what he teaches, so any opportunity that arises, he's going to show his students how to do it the Canadian. 00:17:59 Dr Julie Kerekes Way, whether distinguishing between cultural fit and soft skills, or equating the two concepts. 00:18:05 Dr Julie Kerekes These instructors converge in their perspectives that it's their responsibility to assist their students in understanding Canadian culture in order to be able to communicate effectively. 00:18:15 Dr Julie Kerekes Marjorie, one of the student researchers, corroborated this without considering that Canadian culture may have numerous varieties, and she presented a monocultural view of Canadian culture, stating simply, you have to be aware of what the culture is here. 00:18:32 Dr Julie Kerekes Fundamentally, a clear definition of soft skills is lacking. Although staff firmly expressed the need. 00:18:37 Dr Julie Kerekes To teach such skills. 00:18:38 Dr Julie Kerekes One message conveyed here is that the culture of Canada cultivates a willingness to express one's opinion and be yourself, while another, ironically, is that this disposition of offering one's thoughts and suggestions must be adopted, even if it doesn't come. 00:19:00 Dr Julie Kerekes Aligned with Larosa's ideas, Laura characterises the inability to fit into a Canadian workplace culture as the main reason internationally educated professionals have difficulty finding jobs in their fields. 00:19:12 Dr Julie Kerekes She agrees with LaRoche in her dispute of the widely held beliefs. 00:19:16 Dr Julie Kerekes That a lack, that a. 00:19:17 Dr Julie Kerekes Lack of Canadian work experience is the most prominent obstacle. 00:19:20 Dr Julie Kerekes To obtaining suitable employment. 00:19:23 Dr Julie Kerekes And she says if an employer sees that a person will easily integrate into their team and has the hard skills, then no employer will say, whoa, whoa, but you don't have any experience. 00:19:32 Dr Julie Kerekes In Canada. 00:19:38 Dr Julie Kerekes What's lacking in the instructors responses, however, is a critical examination of what it means to easily integrate. Laura shares her perspective, while again expressing the belief that soft skills are inseparable from personality traits. She encourages language students to create. 00:19:55 Dr Julie Kerekes Themselves a new persona in their new country of residence, setting aside their former identity and replacing it with one that fits into the new Canadian setting. 00:20:05 Dr Julie Kerekes In fact, she describes this process as her most successful moment. Mentoring internationally trained professionals. And she says, I realised that I have to build. 00:20:14 Dr Julie Kerekes We have to build a persona, a Canadian persona, an internationally trained engineer who spoke English very well came from a very different culture, and it was very difficult to understand him and also to get his nonverbal communication. 00:20:26 Dr Julie Kerekes Feels anywhere close to. 00:20:28 Dr Julie Kerekes Canadian Ish resembling anything that would be successful in an interview here. And then I told him that he really needs to think of himself as as who he is, but who he is in Canada. 00:20:39 Dr Julie Kerekes So not a complete, not a different person, but the Canadian version of himself. And he started working on it and we got to incredible results results just after a few classes. 00:20:49 Dr Julie Kerekes Because he realised that it goes deep down to identity, that he really has to somehow figure out a Canadian identity for himself. 00:21:01 Dr Julie Kerekes Lord described the homework assignment she gave this. 00:21:03 Dr Julie Kerekes To you. 00:21:04 Dr Julie Kerekes He was to search for a celebrity that he would like to emulate, so that. 00:21:08 Dr Julie Kerekes He could be. 00:21:09 Dr Julie Kerekes Could build a Canadian identity based on that kind of a role model. 00:21:13 Dr Julie Kerekes Thus, she stated it was their homework to figure out who they were in this new culture. So it wasn't me prescribing anything. It was a bit of a journey, and it was interesting. 00:21:22 Dr Julie Kerekes The results were good. 00:21:24 Dr Julie Kerekes Lawry's student was expected to take responsibility for adapting his very identity to assimilate to Canadian society. 00:21:35 Dr Julie Kerekes In the focus group data, much of the teachers discussions of soft skills Centre on getting along with others in the workplace while at the same time speaking one's mind to a certain degree. 00:21:46 Dr Julie Kerekes Roxanna and ELT instructor at Mesa, suggests that agreeing making a suggestion and responding politely comprise soft skills as well as knowing how to interact with others. 00:21:56 Dr Julie Kerekes Like, how do you say no? How do you be assertive? How do you? 00:21:59 Dr Julie Kerekes Give and respond to criticism. 00:22:02 Dr Julie Kerekes The link curricular material emphasises the need for employees to share their personal characteristics and skills, such as being friendly at work employees like and. 00:22:11 Dr Julie Kerekes So here's a quote from the curriculum curriculum at work, employees like to be friendly. They go on coffee breaks and lunch together. They talk to each other about things that are unimportant or don't cause bad feelings. 00:22:23 Dr Julie Kerekes This friendly conversation is called small talk, the ability to make appropriate small talk is identified by the instructors as a crucial component of soft. 00:22:32 Dr Julie Kerekes The classroom observation data indicate that appropriate small talk topics in May site classes include greetings, the weather, clothing, food, pets, sports, what one did or will do on the weekend once children and in general shared interests. 00:22:48 Dr Julie Kerekes In one class responding to prompts by the instructor, the students identified topics not appropriate for Canadian small talks, and these included identified by them. These included marriage, politics, religion, ones, salary, ones, weight and personal questions. 00:23:04 Dr Julie Kerekes They didn't, however, consider the complications of topics which may be shared interests and still inappropriate. Furthermore, small talk appropriateness was considered strictly in terms of topic choice. 00:23:16 Dr Julie Kerekes The instructor, Sophia, used a handout in her class that focus on appropriate topics for small talk, but it didn't address such intricacies as appropriate ways to talk about the various. 00:23:26 Dr Julie Kerekes Suggested topics or the possibilities that the context as well as ones who one's interlocutor is, would be influential in determining the appropriateness of a given. 00:23:38 Dr Julie Kerekes The implicit message of these lessons on workplace matters is that normative expectations of small talk differ substantially between the students. Home countries in Canada, but that the Canadian expectations alone are self-evident and natural. 00:23:56 Dr Julie Kerekes Some of the workplace soft skills lessons on both the topic of job interviews and the topic of customer service interactions appear. 00:24:04 Dr Julie Kerekes Be grooming the English learners for low status, low paying jobs. In Canada, the lessons are prescriptive and they emphasise self entrepreneurship and seem to be designed to affect students, buy in into the system. 00:24:18 Dr Julie Kerekes The customer service lessons were imbued with an emotional message, which is that the marketplace is where immigrants, as members of the workforce, can experience emotional satisfaction and in turn supply that to the customers. 00:24:34 Dr Julie Kerekes Creating an emotionally satisfying experience is critical for customer service, and the students should provide this service by giving all of themselves at all times, regardless of salary. 00:24:44 Dr Julie Kerekes Brandon's prompt illustrates this disposition in his course, which specialised in customer service and administration for relatively advanced students. 00:24:56 Dr Julie Kerekes He asked his students to imagine themselves as recipients of good customer service and to provide descriptive words about that experience. 00:25:03 Dr Julie Kerekes And in this exchange, he attempts to elicit an emotional response from his students. He reacts to their responses that they would feel happy and relaxed by proclaiming that receiving good customer service will make students more than happy. 00:25:16 Dr Julie Kerekes They'll feel that all of their problems have been solved. 00:25:19 Dr Julie Kerekes Brandon's lesson goes on to elicit responses defining excellent customer service, and he supplies a list of negative emotion words to describe how customers feel when they receive poor customer service. 00:25:31 Dr Julie Kerekes Then they explore a list of positive emotions associated with good customer service. 00:25:39 Dr Julie Kerekes When one student suggests that better customer service may be associated with better salaries, Brandon replies. OK, let's take away the salary aspect of it. 00:25:48 Dr Julie Kerekes Think about all the people who work at places like all the retail stores McDonald's, where minimum wage is paid. Do you get really horrible service because of that sometime? 00:25:58 Dr Julie Kerekes But Brandon says very rarely because these businesses, especially in the food industry, the fast food chains customer service is important because the people serving the coffee, serving the sandwiches and so on, even though their salary is small. 00:26:12 Dr Julie Kerekes The minimum wage is paid. They're trained, they have to have good customer service. 00:26:17 Dr Julie Kerekes It doesn't matter what job they do once their job is to provide a service, they give it their 100% and that's what we as customer service people are supposed to do. 00:26:26 Dr Julie Kerekes So let's look at customer service best practises. So the first thing any organisation does, they provide a service service service with no excuse, no excuses. My job is to provide a service. So that is what I'm supposed to do. 00:26:40 Dr Julie Kerekes In this exchange, students are presented with certain societal norms as truths. English language students are expected to buy into the service model regardless of salary. 00:26:49 Dr Julie Kerekes Brandon doesn't suggest that a subservient attitude will result in students moving into better paying positions. Rather, good customer service is a duty that employees must fulfil at all times. 00:27:00 Dr Julie Kerekes Without exception. 00:27:02 Dr Julie Kerekes Language teaching here has the potential to serve as an apparently benign cloak that masks the ideologically driven norms being taught. 00:27:10 Dr Julie Kerekes Macy's English language students are expected to accept low paying customer service positions and to embrace embrace them without concern for salary. 00:27:18 Dr Julie Kerekes Macy's top down pedagogy reflects the expectation that students should surrender their cultural or personal idiosyncrasies in order to fit into their purported white Canadian middle class business New Year. 00:27:31 Dr Julie Kerekes As Brandon's students learn to provide emotionally driven services, they're also taught how to expect the same as customers. 00:27:37 Dr Julie Kerekes And in this way, they become empowered to participate in Canadian capitalism as both producer and consumer of services. 00:27:45 Dr Julie Kerekes Whose experiences full personal, who experience full personal and professional satisfaction as a player in the market, the classroom data reveal a pedagogy that may indoctrinate students into advance capitalism, a hierarchy in which they are expected to acquire capitalist work attitudes and to take a subservient role. 00:28:10 Dr Julie Kerekes Mesa staff value intentions the ideologies observed in this data set have the potential to promulgate inequitable treatment of immigrants by affecting the attitudes of Canadian employers and the immigrants and job seekers themselves. 00:28:25 Dr Julie Kerekes The pedagogical methods utilised at Mesa for soft skills instruction appear to be underpinned. 00:28:30 Dr Julie Kerekes By a prescription is sometimes deficiency oriented teaching philosophy. Students are expected to be passive recipients of cultural norms and to unquestioningly adapt their own identities to these norms, such that they will acquire a Canadian persona, fit into a monocultural Canadian workplace, and buy into existing ideologies that maintain, maintain a status quo unfavourable. 00:28:52 Dr Julie Kerekes To internationally educated professionals aspiring to climb the socioeconomic ladder within their professional fields. 00:29:02 Dr Julie Kerekes Laura's emphasis on developing a Canadian identity has the markings of an ideologically loaded pedagogical approach that, on the surface appears to be entirely self-evident, as indicated by her description of assigning her to her students to develop for themselves a Canadian persona. 00:29:20 Dr Julie Kerekes There there are. 00:29:21 Dr Julie Kerekes Lots of limitations to the study that I've just described to you. 00:29:29 Dr Julie Kerekes Since the data were collected using a variety of methods and by a number of different graduate students, they don't represent a comprehensive scope of pedagogical practises and beliefs. 00:29:38 Dr Julie Kerekes At Mesa Centre they do provide. However, an illustrative examples that help bridge the conceptual concerns in the existing literature and can be used to make constructive suggestions for developing. 00:29:50 Dr Julie Kerekes Culturally sensitive language teaching approaches. 00:29:54 Dr Julie Kerekes There may be more effective and sensitive methods for soft skills instruction in newcomer language classes than those discussed here. 00:30:01 Dr Julie Kerekes Thompson and Derwing, for example, recommend that culture should be explored rather than taught. While some scholarship still recommends the explicit teaching of pragmatics as self-evident truth. 00:30:13 Dr Julie Kerekes Without a critical or reflexive lens, the time is, uh, the time is right for a critical reflective reflexive practises practise in the teaching and learning of soft skills to come to fruition in actual teaching methods and curricular materials. 00:30:33 Dr Julie Kerekes Thank you very much and I. 00:30:36 Dr Julie Kerekes Look forward to your thoughts and comments. 00:30:42 Helena Wall Thank you very much, Julie. I am going to end the recording there.