Samantha Jackson will present an in-person research seminar on Nov1.
Title: Take my word for it: Evaluations of scripted interview responses
Abstract: With its need for a larger labour force and its well-known multicultural identity, Canada has become a popular destination for economic immigrants. However, the labour market outcomes and experiences of newcomers to Canada are markedly worse compared to those of their similarly educated and similarly skilled Canadian-born counterparts. One explanation given for the immigrant wage gap is low official language proficiency (Picot & Sweetman 2012).
In this talk, I’ll review a verbal guise experiment which investigated attitudes towards local and extra-local English accents. Scripted responses to interview questions from women from Canada, China, England, Germany, India, Jamaica, and Nigeria were audio-recorded. They were then rated and commented on by 96 human resources students from 9 post-secondary institutions in southern Ontario. Despite the content and vocabulary of responses being controlled for, evaluators showed significant bias towards Canadian English voices in the ratings and commentary, and an accent hierarchy emerged. I will contextualize these results with reference to the concepts of standard language ideology (Lippi-Green 2012), linguistic assimilation, and “aural employability”, i.e., “the ability to be heard as employable” (Ramjattan 2023:160), and discuss how these findings directly contradict Canada’s Multiculturalism Act.
