Material scaffolding: Supporting the comprehension of migrant cleaners at work

Abstract

Linguistic diversity is growing in labour markets throughout Europe, including Finland, where cleaning is the most common job for immigrants. This paper explores material scaffolding provided for second language users in tasks involved in cleaning work. The notion of ‘scaffolding’ refers to temporary and adaptive support, and here the emphasis is especially on ‘material scaffolding’, that is, material artefacts and body movements employed in mentoring. The theoretical framework of the study is van Lier’s (2004) ecological perspective on language learning, and a discourse-ethnographic perspective of nexus analysis (Scollon and Scollon 2004) is adopted to analyse the ethnographic data collected at two work sites. Scaffolding is regarded as a nexus of social practices in which participants, interaction orders and mediational means intersect. The social actions in work encounters are explored to show how space, body movements and material artefacts are employed in work-related communication. The observations on these two work sites suggest that cleaning work can be successfully performed with a beginner’s level in the work language as long as guided support is available, and especially if the multiple material mediational means in the immediate surroundings are utilized in scaffolding.