Language cafes at public libraries : Language cafes as a mainstay in the public library’s work as a meeting place

This bachelor thesis aims to examine how library staff experience the impact language cafes has on user integration and personal development, as well to study how language cafes can enable meetings between different individuals. Three different issues were to be answered which were a) how language cafes work on libraries, viewed as a social meeting place, b) how do language work with perceived user integration and c) with perceived personal development? Seven different semi structured interviews were conducted and thus six libraries were studied as two of the interviews were conducted on the same library. The library staff all worked in Skåne län and with language cafes. To analyse the results a theory about low-intensive and high-intensive meeting places was used in combination with four different themes: integration, personal development, disagreement and social contact. The theory that was used were created by Ragnar Audunson and is about how a meeting can be with someone who shares their interests or values, thus making it a high-intensive meeting, or someone who doesn’t share the same interests or values, thus making it a low-intensive meeting. The results of this thesis showed that a language cafe does result in both giving a place and reason for people to meet. There were signs of people developing as people, mainly getting more confidence and in the end seeking internship and thus not needing the language cafe anymore. Another conclusion is that the language cafes can be viewed as a high-intensive meeting place, but also a low-intensive, depending on how people look at and interpret it