“If I make a mistake, I would feel like everybody would laugh”

Finland’s care sector is living through two overlapping transitions. One is demographic: the population is ageing, and the need for nurses and practical nurses is estimated to grow significantly in the coming decades. The other is political that leads to linguistic transition: The government has abolished adult education allowance but at the same time is promoting the recruitment of labor from abroad. This leads to a situation where more care work is being done by professionals who learn Finnish on the job—in real interactions with colleagues, customers, and family members, not in the safe space of a classroom.

What happens when language learning moves into the workplace—where mistakes can feel public, time is scarce, and communication is tied to professional competence and patient safety?

In our recent study, we interviewed internationally educated nurses working in care sector in different parts of Finland. We were not asking them about emotions. Yet emotions—especially shame and the fear of being laughed at—kept surfacing on their own. This matters, because emotions shape whether people dare to speak, ask questions, or take the small linguistic risks that gradually build fluency.

This post shares what we learned about Second Language Workplace Shame (SLWS)—a concept we propose to describe the shame associated with using and learning a second language specifically in health care workplace. It also considers what employers, colleagues, educators, and society can do to make workplaces better places to learn Finnish—without compromising the dignity of internationally educated nurses but rather improving patient safety.

Why language emotions belong in the care workforce conversation

When discussions about internationally recruited care workers become heated, they often revolve around competence: “Is their Finnish good enough?” That framing misses a critical point: language learning is not only a cognitive task. It is also a social and emotional process. In a classroom, there is a shared understanding that learners make mistakes. In a workplace—especially in healthcare—language mistakes can feel like evidence of professional inadequacy.

Our interviewees described how their Finnish was evaluated not by a teacher, but by native speakers like colleagues, customers, and relatives. That shift matters. It changes what “success” looks like, what “failure” feels like, and how high the stakes seem in everyday moments: taking a phone call, documenting care, asking for clarification, joining breakroom talk, or reporting summarised in the title: “If I make a mistake, I would feel like everybody would laugh”.

The nurses we interviewed are not a “problem” to be fixed. They are already part of the workforce, already caring for people. Their accounts illuminate a simple truth: if we want people to learn Finnish effectively at work, we must understand what helps—or blocks—that learning.

We interviewed nine internationally educated nurses using semi-structured conversations about language use at work, at home, and during leisure time, as well as about learning Finnish. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed qualitatively using discourse-analytic and content-analytic approaches.

Across the interviews, we identified 33 emotion descriptions related to learning or using Finnish at work: 18 positive (like pride and joy) and 15 negative (especially shame-related experiences). The striking part was not only that negative emotions were common, but that shame appeared even though we never asked about feelings. It came up spontaneously—suggesting it is an important part of workplace language learning.

Eight of the nine nurses described shame-related experiences. In other words, shame was not an occasional footnote; it was a recurring theme.

From “language anxiety” to “workplace shame”: why terminology matters

Research on second language emotions often focuses on anxiety in classroom learning. But the workplace is different. In healthcare, language is used to coordinate tasks, comfort customers, ensure safety, and document care. The emotional load of the job is already high. Add language vulnerability, and the stakes rise further.

To capture this, we draw on earlier work on foreign language classroom shame, but we propose an adapted concept: Second Language Workplace Shame (SLWS).

SLWS describes a pattern where Finnish language use triggers:

• Fear of making mistakes
• Fear of negative evaluation
• Embarrassment in front of others
• Avoidance of speaking or writing
• Withdrawal from interaction
• Reduced opportunities to learn

This aligns with a “vicious circle” described in earlier foreign language classroom shame research (Galmiche 2017): fear leads to shame anticipation; shame leads to avoidance; avoidance slows learning; slower learning increases fear—feeding the cycle.

But SLWS adds a workplace-specific dimension: language is tied to professional identity. In care work, poor Finnish can be perceived—by self or others—as poor competence, even when clinical skills are strong. That perception can hurt.

“I didn’t speak for a year”: fear, avoidance, and the cost of silence

One participant put it plainly: “I didn’t speak for a year. I never used a word because I used to be so scared to make a mistake.”

This is not a story about laziness. It’s a story about risk management. If speaking might trigger laughter—or even a smirk—silence can feel safer. Yet silence is expensive. Language develops through use. If fear blocks speaking, learning slows down.

Another participant described early health care workplace experiences as “very embarrassing” because she couldn’t understand what others were saying. She repeated the word “embarrassing” multiple times, emphasising how intense and memorable the experience was.

These accounts show why workplace language learning is not simply a matter of offering vocabulary lists or grammar lessons. It is also about creating interactional safety: a climate where people dare to speak, even imperfectly.

Laughter and smirks: small reactions, big power

A recurring trigger for shame was the idea of being laughed at—or the memory of it happening. One interviewee said:

“If I make a mistake then I would feel like everybody would laugh.”

Even when laughter was not constant, the possibility of it was enough to shape behavior. In shame research, it is often the anticipation of negative evaluation—not necessarily the evaluation itself—that drives avoidance.

Workplace laughter may be playful and unintentional. But it can also function as a subtle form of social power: it signals what counts as “normal Finnish,” who is competent, and who is exposed.

One interviewee described colleagues who “smirk” when a nursing student doesn’t understand things right away. A smirk may seem minor, but in a hierarchical environment, it can feel like a public marking of failure.

Why shame is not only about speaking

A workplace-specific finding was how often shame was connected to writing, especially documentation and reporting. Several participants described situations where a mistaken word in a report led to embarrassment—sometimes with lasting consequences, like losing trust in translation tools.

Healthcare documentation is not optional; it is central to patient care, continuity, and accountability. That means writing becomes a high-stakes language arena. Errors can feel permanent because they are visible on screen, open to review, and tied to professional responsibility. One of the interviewees was ashamed to realise he had written claw instead of leg: the claw has been moisturized.

In language research, shame is often studied in spoken classroom performance. Our data suggests that in health care workplaces, documentation may be one of the most shame-sensitive sites of language learning.

The good news is that the same workplaces that can generate shame can also generate its antidote: recognition.

The most common positive emotion in our interviews was pride, linked to positive feedback from colleagues and supervisors in front of colleagues and supervisors. One nurse described how receiving good comments about improving fast helped him finally start speaking. As shame grows from fear of other’s gaze, positive feedback in front of others seems to have opposite effect. Positive feedback in front of others breaks the vicious cycle of shame

In the shame cycle, negative evaluation (or fear of it) pushes people into avoidance. Add positive feedback and the cycle breaks: supportive evaluation pulls people into participation.

What can workplaces do

If Finland increasingly relies on learning Finnish through work, then workplaces become language-learning environments—whether they intend to or not. Here are three evidence-informed practices suggested by our findings:

1) Train mentors and supervisors to recognise shame triggers. Shame is often hidden, but it has predictable triggers: public correction and laughter at mistakes. Mentors can learn to spot the moment when a learner freezes or withdraws—and respond in ways that keep interaction open.

2) Build “permission to be imperfect” into everyday talk. Language learning requires experimentation and play. Work communities can normalise clarification, paraphrasing, and checking understanding without making it a performance issue.

3) Treat documentation as language learning. Instead of pointing out “wrong words,” teams can develop supportive routines: gentle and regular collaborative review that focuses on meaning.

These moves are not “soft” extras. They are part of workforce sustainability. A nurse who avoids speaking or writing out of fear is a nurse whose language development is slowed—and whose integration into the team and society may be threatened. Supporting language confidence is, ultimately, supporting retention, safety, and wellbeing.

Why emotions matter

In the public debate on health care, internationally educated nurses are often talked about rather than listened to. This study aims to shift that: to take their lived experiences seriously and to show how language, emotion, work and societal structures intersect.

Finland’s health care future depends not only on recruitment, but on belonging: whether people feel safe enough to participate, learn, and grow into their professional roles in Finnish.

Shame is not inevitable. It is socially produced—and therefore socially reducible.

If we can design workplaces where second language learning is supported with dignity, we not only improve language outcomes. We strengthen teams, protect patient safety, and uphold a society that recognises health care workers as whole people—not just labour inputs.

The sentence that titles this post—“if I make a mistake then I would feel like everybody would laugh”—is perhaps something we can all relate to. Many of us remember language-learning moments in foreign language classroom where we felt exposed. The difference is that these nurses are not making mistakes in a classroom exercise. They are learning while caring for our parents, our grandparents, and, one day, perhaps us.

The least we can do is ensure that the workplace they enter is not only efficient, but also humane.