Examining space, silence, and agency in language socialization of an international student in the EAP and mainstream courses

Abstract

AbstractThis article draws on the concept of the Production of Space (Lefebvre, 1991) to interpret the silence of one female international student from Japan in two semesters of study in a New Zealand Tertiary institution. Data from an English for Academic Purposes course and mainstream courses, and from various sources including video/audio recordings of classroom interactions, interviews, diaries, field notes, institutional documents are presented. The findings show that silence is produced by the academic social space in three aspects of perceived, conceived, and lived. The new perceived space of learning positioned the focal student as unfamiliar in her new habitat. The conceived space also silenced the focal student because the conceived space exerted socio‐academic norms in which the individual was not invested. Finally, the lived space produced a silent individual in the sense that she appeared as less powerful in her interactions with other peers because her sociocultural and linguistic capabilities were not on a par with those of other peers. The study concludes that space is an active, dynamic, and social being that regulates the individual's interactions and that silence should be understood in relation to one's positioning by the social space, and the appropriation of space by the individual in social space. Notably, despite being positioned as a silent individual by the academic social space, the international student exercised agency both to respond to her specific temporal needs in the host learning context and to realize her future aspirations.