Literate Practice in Factories of the Future: A Linguistic Ethnography

Project Details

This project addresses the common claim that the contemporary workforce does not yet have the literacy competencies required for the highly technologized manufacturing workplaces associated with the fourth Industrial Revolution (Industrie 4.0—the digitization of work). Linguistic research supporting this claim is scarce and patchy. The aim of this project is to develop a linguistic ethnography of a site or sites within a ‘factory of the future’—a digitized manufacturing environment. The focus of the ethnography will be on identifying and describing established, new and emerging literate practices and analyzing if, how and to what extent these practices contribute to he development of new working knowledge.

Collaborators

LALE colleagues; Centre for Vocational and Educational Policy

Sub-Disciplines

Applied Linguistics; sociology of the professions