Negotiating rates of exchange: Arab academic sojourners’ sociolinguistic trajectories in the UK

This doctoral project investigates the sociolinguistic trajectories of eight Arab academic sojourners in the UK. Although there is a considerable body of empirical study abroad research, this research has been criticised for its imbalance and inconsistency. Coleman (2013) asks study abroad researchers to see sojourners as ‘whole people with whole lives’ instead of fragmenting their ‘minds, bodies, and social behaviours into separate domains of inquiry’ (Kramsch, 2009, p. 2). In addition, Kinginger (2009) explains that study abroad research has been limited to North American, Cross-European and Asia-Pacific contexts.
This study springs from the need to document the unheard stories of Arab academic sojourners in the UK to explore the impact of mobility and sociocultural heterogeneity on sojourners’ conceptualisations of English, perceptions of themselves as speakers of English, and on their social encounters in the UK. This qualitative, longitudinal inquiry has been conducted through in-depth interviews over a period of eight months. Research data comes from initial pair interviews conducted within one month of the participants’ arrival in the UK as well as five rounds of individual interviews, resulting in a total of 44 interviews.
Thematic analysis of the dataset has featured striking commonalities in the group. The study found that participants’ perceptions of their investment in English were profoundly affected by their mobility. While they valued their investment in English as a tool to access Higher Education in the United Kingdom, their unexpected experiences of shifts in their language value made them aware of the limitations of their linguistic and social capital, thereby affecting their perceptions of their English and contributing to new conceptualisations of English. Not only did these realisations destabilise participants’ perceptions of themselves as speakers of English, but further affected their social encounters, which ultimately led to some sort of ghettoisation that significantly limited their social networks in the UK.