Discourse Socialization in Synchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

Abstract

This paper, based on a qualitative ethnographic study among college of education students, examines the online interactional processes surrounding academic discourse socialization. Data for this paper come from a larger study of an academic classroom community of graduate students and their instructor. In this study, I looked into the ways computer-mediated communication (CMC) contexts factor into graduate students' academic literacy experience in a graduate classroom, therein enculturating them into their new academic community. I focus on cases of nonnative graduate students in a content course in the department of educational psychology at a large southwestern university in the U.S. I explore the agency of the focal participants in terms of the roles they played in the classroom discourse highlighting the dialectical and interactional perspective of academic discourse socialization. This paper focused on the construction of varied participant roles of the focal students. It further examines student reactions and responses to these constructions during synchronous CMC activity.