Browsing by Subject "Language socialization"

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    Consulting based on who (I think) you are: Patterns of interaction in online writing center consultations based on perceived and documented identity
    (2023-01) Gyendina, Mariya
    Recently, writing centers have been expanding their services to include synchronous and asynchronous online consultations. This raises a range of questions about consultant training, consultant-student interactions, and experiences of different groups of students in the online environment. A small, but growing, body of scholarship is addressing these gaps (e.g., Severino, Swenson, & Zhu, 2009; Weirick, Davis, & Lawson, 2017), but many questions remain unexamined. As a methodologically rigorous examination of the writing center interactions rooted in a theoretical framework, this study is informed by language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Ochs & Schieffelin, 2017) and scaffolding theories (Mackiewicz & Thompson, 2013) to analyze online interactions between consultants and students. These theoretical frameworks have been used to effectively examine strategies appearing in face-to-face writing consultations, but have not been applied to online contexts, thus giving this project an opportunity to extend the approach further and gain a deeper understanding of interactions in online writing center conversations. This study looks at perceived (multilingual/non-multilingual) and documented (international/domestic) identity datasets, combining qualitative and statistical analyses to explore correlations between students’ linguistic identity and the interaction patterns. Findings show distinct patterns of providing feedback within both perceived and documented datasets, with statistically significant differences in the number of words per session, number of words used by consultant, total number of comments, use of cognitive scaffolding strategies, questions, content-based comments, genre analysis, rhetorical explanations, and rapport-building comments. The findings of this study support previous literature in demonstrating the multi-directional nature of language socialization processes within writing center consultations and go further by highlighting the connection between the language socialization process and patterns of engagement. This finding is reinforced in looking at the types of feedback provided to students, where I show that the use of cognitive scaffolding strategies is similarly a multi-directional process supporting the consultants, as well as the students.
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    Traveling through spatial repertoires and mathematics: Dialogic nature of physics discourse practices and socialization activities
    (2020-08) Lai, Yi-Ju
    Language socialization research examines how situated discursive practices mediate socialization activities, and how members from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds participate in socialization activities to develop disciplinary expertise and membership. Bringing together Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism of ‘chronotope’ and ‘heteroglossia’ and a multimodal conversation analysis method, the present dissertation study builds on and extends this research by examining how bilingual international graduate assistants in science fields engage their undergraduate students to construct discipline-specific meanings through the chronotopic (re)contextualization of their prior physics reasoning and future applications in present discussions about physics events. This study also explores how competing interactions between undergraduate physics students in international graduate assistant-led learning contexts create spaces for peer language socialization. In addition, this study uncovers the tensions experienced by international graduate assistants concerning the institutionalized ideological forms of knowledge construction within a physics community. This dissertation study is drawn from a larger, multi-site ethnographic language socialization project. Data examined for the study included 98 hours of video-recordings of classroom socialization activities between international graduate assistants and their U.S. undergraduate students in three undergraduate-level physics classes. Findings illustrate the simultaneous chronotopes of physics discursive practices engaged student participation and maintained the sequential chronotope in international graduate assistant-led socialization activities, demonstrating a joint attention between instructors and students as co-contributors to meaning making. The chronotopic link creates a dialogic space in which multidiscursive practices of knowledge construction were achieved through the integration of disciplinary spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolism and images. Findings also highlight the heteroglossic nature of physics discourse practices and demonstrate how tension in competing notions of how to construct disciplinary expertise were resolved through ‘carnival play’ (Bakhtin, 1981) which mitigated student mathematics anxiety. The competing discourses of expertise between undergraduates created spaces for peer language socialization which might momentarily decenter the international graduate assistants’ position as physics instructors but opened the floor to a number of legitimate ways of constructing expertise in a physics community. The present dissertation study suggests a spatial repertoire-informed chronotopic turn in analyzing the dynamic multiplicity of physics discourse practices and socialization activities in academic contexts (Lai, 2020).