Abstract
Oral academic discourse socialization refers to a process through which students learn about the conventions and practices of their disciplinary fields while doing academic spoken practices. In this study, it refers to the interactions of the participant teachers with their peers and instructors as well as their engagement with academic texts. This paper reports on academic discourse socialization of several EFL teachers in a TEFL graduate program in Iran through oral discourse practices including small-group discussions and debates after microteachings over the first year of the program. It explores how the student teachers are initiated further into the values and practices of their EFL discourse community through collegial interactions with their peers. The active participation of the participant teachers in discourse socialization practices facilitated learning in a collaborative learning community. The participants shared their personal practical experiences, scaffolded their peers and engaged with assigned academic texts. Designing professional training programs that are likely to contribute to collegial interaction can be of great importance in teacher education programs.
Highlights
Graduate study is a very important part of any academic discourse community as it can initiate students into their professional discourse communities by introducing them to topics under discussion, disciplinary language, and discourse community culture
This paper reports on academic discourse socialization of several EFL teachers in a TEFL graduate program in Iran through oral discourse practices including small-group discussions and debates after microteachings over the first year of the program
Like other graduate students in other fields, graduate students in the TESOL discourse community undergo the process of academic discourse socialization to become initiated into the discourse cultures of the community
Summary
Graduate study is a very important part of any academic discourse community as it can initiate students into their professional discourse communities by introducing them to topics under discussion, disciplinary language, and discourse community culture. The underlying epistemologies of academic disciplines are mainly acquired when discourse community members are engaged in dialogical interactions with each other as well as their educational and sociocultural setting It was around the late 1980s when attention was shifted towards the relationship between cognitive and social aspects of language learning focusing on language socialization of learners in their natural settings (e.g., Firth & Wagner, 1997; Kasper, 1997; Lantolf, 2000). Studies on academic discourse socialization of graduate students have been carried out covering issues including the voice and identity of graduate students in their new academic settings (e.g., Ahmadi, Samad, & Noordin, 2013; Hirvela & Belcher, 2001; Ivanič & Camps, 2001), the relationship between the students ‘vernacular discourse communities and the communities they are socialized into (Canagarajah, 2002), their experiences in the process of academic disciplinary socialization through written discourse (Spack, 1997; Zamel & Spack, 1998) as well as socialization through oral presentation and interaction (e.g., Duff, 2003; Kobayashi, 2003; Morita, 2002; Zappa-Hollman, 2007)
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