Language Socialization

Language socialization, as an area of study, represents an orientation to language and literacy development in particular communities and settings that is informed by anthropology, sociology, (socio)linguistics, and education (Duff, Reference Duff, Hornberger and McKay2010, in press; Duff & Hornberger, Reference Duff and Hornberger2008). It also draws on cultural psychology and especially neo-Vygotskyan sociocultural theory (Duff, Reference Duff2007a). A language socialization perspective, of which discourse socialization is but one (sub-) focus, sees development as culturally situated, as mediated, and as replete with social, cultural, and political meanings in addition to propositional or ideational meanings carried or indexed by various linguistic, textual, and paralinguistic forms. The core theoretical premise of language socialization is that language is learned through interactions with others who are more proficient in the language and its cultural practices and who provide novices explicit and (or) implicit mentoring or evidence about normative, appropriate uses of the language, and of the worldviews, ideologies, values, and identities of community members. Major early intellectual forces in the development of this theoretical focus from anthropology, sociology, and linguistics were Dell Hymes (see review of his work in Ervin-Tripp, Reference Ervin-Tripp2009), Schieffelin and Ochs (Reference Schieffelin and Ochs1986), and Bernstein (Reference Bernstein and Giglioli1972). Halliday (e.g., 1980/Reference Halliday and Webster2003) examined language development (socialization) in terms of (a) learning language, (b) learning through language, and (c) learning about language. Finally, Heath's (Reference Heath1983) seminal book Ways with Words demonstrated the relationship between language and literacy socialization practices in the home, at school, and in work contexts and was therefore another important precursor to contemporary work on language socialization into academic discourse.

According to language socialization theory, as learners gain knowledge of language and an ability to participate in new discourse communities by using language appropriately, they gain various other kinds of information or cultural knowledge about ideologies, identities or subjectivities, affective orientations, linguistic and nonlinguistic content (history, mathematics) and practices valued by the local community (Ochs, Reference Ochs, Schieffelin and Ochs1986). For example, students in classrooms are often socialized into and through discourses of (showing) respect (and self-control, decorum) to teachers, to one another, and to the subject matter itself (e.g., Howard & Lo, Reference Howard and Lo2009; Talmy, Reference Talmy2009); that is, they are not just socialized into the pragmatics or sociolinguistics of showing respect but also into ideologies of respect, including aspects of social stratification, ranks, roles, and values—which they, in turn, may either internalize or, rather, challenge or resist. In elementary school classrooms, classroom discourse can provide clear evidence of other types of ideologies, too, such as the need for autonomous and independent academic work versus collaboration and shared knowledge production and ownership (e.g., Toohey, Reference Toohey1998). In bilingual, diglossic, or multilingual contexts, the language or code used in classrooms, and the norms related to whether, when, and with whom other linguistic codes are allowed are themselves important aspects of socialization.

Textbooks and other publications (e.g., journals) often have a clear socializing or enculturating role as well, regarding the objectivity or objectification of science (Viechnicki & Kuipers, Reference Viechnicki and Kuipers2008), for example, or ideologies of “perseverance, seniority, the importance of education and modesty,” in the case of Chinese heritage-language textbooks (Curdt-Christiansen, Reference Curdt-Christiansen2008, p. 100). In U.S. law schools, students are socialized to the authority of legal texts. Mertz (Reference Mertz2007) demonstrated how the ability to use past legal cases (legal precedents) for current purposes is a crucial component of legal education. Socratic classroom questioning often centers on the legal cases and related notes and reports in textbooks, with a focus on facts, technical legal vocabulary, and prior legal decisions or opinions (i.e., hierarchically layered legal authority from different levels of courts or legislatures). Such classroom discourse also serves to socialize students into adversarial, doctrinal courtroom discourse and also into how to “build analogies between the case before them and earlier cases” (p. 61).

Numerous overviews of language socialization exist. Duff and Hornberger's (Reference Duff and Hornberger2008) edited volume includes a 30-year historical review of language socialization as a subfield of linguistic anthropology (Ochs & Schieffelin, Reference Ochs, Schieffelin, Duff and Hornberger2008), a chapter on academic discourse socialization in university mainstream content areas (Morita & Kobayashi, Reference Morita, Kobayashi, Duff and Hornberger2008), another on language socialization and schooling (Baquedano-López & Kattan, Reference Baquedano-López, Kattan, Duff and Hornberger2008), and a chapter looking at the intersections between language socialization for higher education and for professional work (Duff, Reference Duff, Duff and Hornberger2008). Bronson and Watson-Gegeo (Reference Bronson, Watson-Gegeo, Duff and Hornberger2008), in the same volume, emphasized the need for studies of language socialization that incorporate critical theoretical perspectives; using the example of one writer, a Japanese doctoral student in California, they also argued that the student, Keiko, deliberately resisted certain grammatical forms in English (definite articles) as a way to preserve her identity and voice as a Japanese person (see also Bronson, Reference Bronson2004, and the discussion that follows here). Garrett and Baquedano-López (Reference Garrett and Baquedano-López2002) provided a very comprehensive earlier review of language socialization and issues of cross-generation reproduction versus transformation in norms of language use and code choice across transcultural contexts and Bayley and Schecter's (Reference Bayley and Schecter2003) edited volume includes studies of school-based or postsecondary language socialization as well. Finally, Zuengler and Cole (Reference Zuengler, Cole and Hinkel2005) reviewed 17 studies taking a language socialization perspective, a number of them dealing with school language and literacy.

Elsewhere, I have considered various dimensions of language/discourse socialization into academic communities, based on research in both L1 and L2 settings. I have also problematized certain aspects of academic discourse socialization by examining some of the misconceptions often held about it, such as that so-called experts are necessarily good, competent socializers (e.g., good presenters, writers, mentors) or that the biggest challenge for students in academia is formal technical or academic written discourse rather than other more interpersonal forms of discourse and communication found in class discussions or other informal academic interactions (Duff, Reference Duff2004, Reference Duff, Marriott, Moore and Spence-Brown2007b; see also Bunch, Reference Bunch2009).

Socialization into academic discourse, especially in middle-class Anglo-European families, typically begins in the home during early childhood as children are prepared for the kind of school-related literacies and language practices (e.g., show and tell, picture book reading interactions, reader response, discussions about current events, problem solving, and hypothesizing in North American schooling). This preparation affects one's ability to engage in more sophisticated literacy activities later, which in turn affects subsequent workplace, professional, or vocational socialization and performance (Duff, Reference Duff, Duff and Hornberger2008; Heath, Reference Heath1983; Ochs & Taylor, Reference Ochs, Taylor, Kramsch and McConnell-Ginet1992). Language socialization research now focuses more than before on both older learners in a variety of activity settings (rather than young children) and on socialization into academic literacy practices and not only, or primarily, oral ones (e.g., Séror, Reference Séror2008; Zappa-Hollman, Reference Zappa-Hollman2007b). The newer research on postsecondary academic literacy socialization extends scholarship on genre and written composition produced nearly two decades earlier (e.g., Berkenkotter, Huckin, & Ackerman, Reference Berkenkotter, Huckin and Ackerman1988; Casanave, Reference Casanave1990).

Regardless of the age of learners or the context involved in (academic) language socialization research, much of it has also incorporated the notion of apprenticeship (Rogoff, Reference Rogoff1990) into the ways of thinking and acting in a particular community of practice (CoP; Lave & Wenger, Reference Lave and Wenger1991), while also (increasingly) noting the limitations of the CoP construct in classroom discourse studies (Duff, Reference Duff, Marriott, Moore and Spence-Brown2007b; Haneda, Reference Haneda2006; Zuengler & Miller, Reference Zuengler, Miller, Cole and Zuengler2008). Zappa-Hollman (Reference Zappa-Hollman2007b) suggested that a social network approach (what she called individual networks of practice) may account for students’ simultaneous engagements with richly distributed human, material, and symbolic resources and relationships (their individual networks) better than the typically narrower, more immediate, apolitical, and tightly circumscribed sense of discourse socialization associated with CoP.

Academic Discourse

Academic discourse (or academic language, academic literacies) refers to forms of oral and written language and communication—genres, registers, graphics, linguistic structures, interactional patterns—that are privileged, expected, cultivated, conventionalized, or ritualized, and, therefore, usually evaluated by instructors, institutions, editors, and others in educational and professional contexts. (Professional discourse is subsumed here under the cover term of academic discourse because generally professional socialization has a strong academic component prior to or concurrent with internships and other field experience in the professions and because academia itself is a professional site.) Martin and Rose (Reference Martin and Rose2007) described discourse as “meaning beyond the clause. . . . the social as it is constructed through texts, . . . the constitutive role of meanings in social life” (p. 1). Academic discourse is usually connected with specific disciplines or professional areas and is embodied both in texts and in other modes of interaction and representation. It is normally inculcated within academic communities such as school or university programs and classrooms. Some students, in postcolonial or lingua franca settings, for example (Duff, Reference Duff, Bailey and Nunan1996; Moore, Reference Moore, Duff and Hornberger2008), may have opportunities to be socialized bilingually or multilingually into academic discourse(s). However, in English-dominant immigrant-receiving settings or other multilingual contexts, students may be expected to develop proficiency in English academic discourse but not in their home languages and literacies, or not to the same extent. Regardless, academic discourse is a complex representation of knowledge and authority and identity that comprises language(s), ideologies, and other semiotic or symbolic resources, often displayed in texts, but one that has strong social, cultural, institutional, and historical foundations and functions (Leki, Reference Leki2007). As Fairclough (Reference Fairclough1989) put it, discourse is text, interaction, and context.

Academic discourse is continually evolving, and many new, sometimes experimental and highly personal, creative genres exist (e.g., Kouritzen, Piquemal, & Norman, Reference Kouritzen, Piquemal and Norman2009), some of which complement—even transgress—traditional norms of standard academic discourse(s), such as those requiring that research articles follow the structure of introduction, methods, results and discussion, commonly referred to as IMRAD. Nevertheless, applied linguists usually associate academic discourse with particular genres, genre sets, and registers, and often a relatively formal register, with subject-specific (or disciplinary) linguistic, discursive, and multimodal conventions (see, e.g., Biber, Reference Biber2006). Studies of academic discourse and the socialization of students to engage with it and to participate in new discourse communities have tended to be associated primarily with written or visual texts and their production although that more limited notion is changing (Molle & Prior, Reference Molle and Prior2008). Despite sometimes being described as such, academic discourse or even individual genres are not homogeneous, singular, pure, or static forms of discourse; they often contain hybrid and multimodal features and change over time and across contexts and are enacted within the constraints and contingencies of each local setting (Prior, Reference Prior1998).

Students entering academic institutions have different amounts and kinds of prior experience with academic discourse, even when their home language is the same as that of the educational institution. Mature English-speaking students entering English-medium higher education after some years of absence may experience “change, difficulty, crises of confidence, conflicts of identity, feelings of strangeness, the need to discover the rules of an unfamiliar world” (Ivanič, Reference Ivanič1998, p. 7). For students coming from disadvantaged or minority languages and backgrounds, the challenges become particularly salient. Leibowitz (Reference Leibowitz2005) described black isiXhosa-speaking students’ socialization into academic discourse in an English-medium South African university. Students’ discomfort often stems from an acute awareness of differences across the worlds of their homes, communities, or prior school experiences and those in the current educational setting. Starfield's (Reference Starfield2002) ethnographic case studies in a South African first-year university sociology program illustrated similar disjunctions.

However, students’ discomfort is often not simply a perception on their part, an internally generated form of anxiety or a lack of immediate identification or familiarity with the new target discourses and community practices. It is also coconstructed through interactions and other social practices, by dominant power structures and prevailing discourses of exclusion, including gendered discourses (Morita, Reference Morita2004, Reference Morita2009; Tracy, Reference Tracy1997). Thus, also affecting students’ experiences of socialization is the way newcomers and their histories and aspirations are viewed and by how they are positioned—by themselves, by others, and by their institutions—as capable (or incapable), as worthy, legitimate, showing potential for fuller participation or membership (or not), as insiders (or outsiders), and so on. Unfortunately, as many language socialization researchers have found, some programs, activities, and instructors are more effective socializing agents or mediators than others (Casanave & Li, Reference Casanave and Li2008; Morita, Reference Morita2004, Reference Morita2009; Séror, Reference Séror2008; Zappa-Hollman, Reference Zappa-Hollman2007a, Reference Zappa-Hollman2007b). Those who are most successful not only display, but also make explicit, the values and practices implicit in the culture and provide novices with the language, skills, support, and opportunities they need to participate with growing competence in the new culture and its core activities (Duff, Reference Duff, Marriott, Moore and Spence-Brown2007b, Reference Duff, Hornberger and McKay2010). With students coming from a range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds and variable levels of out-of-school support for their academic literacies, the challenges are typically magnified (Morita, Reference Morita2000). As Heath (Reference Heath1983) and others (e.g., Hawkins, Reference Hawkins2005) have demonstrated, young children from minority cultures must learn academic or “school” discourse very early on in order to succeed, particularly if they do not come to school with the vaunted cultural, symbolic, and discursive capital and social practices of mainstream educational culture. Older newcomers have less time to catch up and have a very steep linguistic, discursive, and cultural learning curve once mainstreamed in content or professional areas.

Oral Academic Discourse Socialization

As much research has demonstrated (e.g., Biber, Reference Biber2006), oral and written academic discourse are quite distinct and so too are the ways in which students are socialized into target practices, genres, registers, and speech events. Oral academic discourse is normally much more spontaneous and public than written discourse, the latter often produced in relative isolation by a writer (student, professor)—although with a great deal of social academic experience leading up to the writing—and then submitted to someone else for private assessment or comment. Yet the two modalities, oral and written, are not completely distinct, because oral presentations or lectures typically draw on a variety of written texts and may also incorporate visual texts by means of PowerPoint, handouts, or other media, to facilitate communication (e.g., Kobayashi, Reference Kobayashi2003, Reference Kobayashi2004). Similarly, any given text, oral or written, is not a stand-alone construction because, especially in academic discourse, it normally draws on and interweaves many other texts. Nevertheless, in this section I consider issues in oral academic discourse socialization first, since it has been the most neglected in studies of academic discourse.

There is more to academic socialization than just learning to read and write standard academic discourse, which is nevertheless a crucial form of knowledge construction, representation, and assessment. For example, learning to participate effectively in initiation-response-evaluation (IRE) exchanges, which are a staple in many teacher-fronted classes around the world, may pose challenges for many learners but must be mastered (Mehan, Reference Mehan1979). IRE has therefore been researched a great deal from many theoretical and methodological approaches, including language socialization. Contributors to Barnard and Torres-Guzman's (Reference Barnard and Torres-Guzman2009) volume illustrated how students in elementary and secondary schools in different parts of the world are inducted or socialized through oral classroom discourse, including IRE, into locally sanctioned knowledge and practice.

Oral communication skills displayed in presentations, mini-lectures, group project work, and class discussions are now being stressed and assessed by instructors and peers more than before and are therefore being researched more by language socialization scholars as well (e.g., Duff, Reference Duff1995, Reference Duff, Barnard and Torres-Guzman2009; Duff & Kobayashi, Reference Duff, Kobayashi and Batstone2010; Kobayashi, Reference Kobayashi, Beckett and Miller2006; Morita, Reference Morita2000; Tracy, Reference Tracy1997; Zappa-Hollman, Reference Zappa-Hollman2007b). This emphasis on orality reflects, in part, the amount and quality of collaboration and communication (and not just textbook knowledge or theory) that are now required in real-world knowledge building and knowledge sharing in a variety of professional and academic fields—from medicine to engineering, pharmacy, education, social work, and clinical psychology (Duff, Reference Duff, Hornberger and McKay2010). The students themselves in these new discourse communities may be asked to evaluate their own and others’ participation in these highly oral, collaborative activity settings, normally on the basis of participants’ social interaction skills as well as their knowledge of academic discourse. Although oral academic discourse has not received as much attention in the relevant research in applied linguistics as written discourse has to date, new research demonstrates just how socially, cognitively, and discursively complex and variable a standard oral activity such as oral presentation can be, whether in the context of a classroom or boardroom, a thesis or dissertation defense theatre, or a conference.

Tracy (Reference Tracy1997), a professor of communication, was a participant observer in a 2-year study of a weekly academic colloquium series in communication departments at two U.S. universities. She documented the academic discourse socialization and related identity work taking place for members of the department: graduate students, visitors, and professors of different rank and gender, for whom every week a colleague was scheduled to make a formal presentation on their work. The socialization practices were associated (potentially) with conflict, tensions, the loss of face, and dilemmas, as her book's subtitle, Dilemmas of Academic Discourse, reveals. Furthermore, the colloquium involved a complex merging of oral and literate practices and of less contextualized, impersonal language as well as more contextualized, interpersonal language and interaction.

Unlike most written discourse, oral presentations are often commented upon publicly immediately after the speaker has finished, which makes them potentially face-threatening to both presenters and audience members who are expected to provide commentary, critique, and stimulating questions and points for follow up discussion (e.g., Duff, Reference Duff, Barnard and Torres-Guzman2009). In a study of doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in physics, Jacoby (Reference Jacoby1998) examined the functions served by the conference talk rehearsal, as part of the discursive and professional socialization of physicists in physics labs with fellow graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, supervisors, and others. One significant part of Jacoby's analysis was the problem-solving comment sequences and complaints (based on what she called indigenous assessment) following the practice sessions. She described these as being specifically “designed and heard as not only concerned with particular problems in particular presentations, but also as communicating general lessons about the alleged conventional and moral expectations of a conference talk presentation, as a genre and as an event, in the communication of science” (p. 364).

Kobayashi (Reference Kobayashi2003, Reference Kobayashi2004, Reference Kobayashi, Beckett and Miller2006) examined how undergraduate Japanese exchange students at a Canadian university were socialized into required practices in support of their final group project presentations (see also Beckett, Reference Beckett2005, for research on socialization through project work at the secondary school level). He traced the in-class and out-of-class development of the project, a kind of living, organic process, as students became co-agents of socialization, coaching one another through a variety of meetings and rehearsals and strategies, using both Japanese and English, in order to ultimately deliver an effective English presentation. They also worked together to produce grammatical PowerPoint slides and concoct pragmatic strategies to engage their audience and teacher in appropriate, sometimes humorous, ways.

Zappa-Hollman (Reference Zappa-Hollman2007a) and Morita (Reference Morita2000) examined the very different specifications and characteristics of oral presentations across disciplines (e.g., applied linguistics, neuroscience, history, and engineering). In addition, each presentation they observed was not viewed as independent of the others but was contingent upon prior experience and moment-by-moment developments. Students often chose strategies for their own implementation of the activity based on what they perceived to be successful, unsuccessful, original, or unoriginal in previous presentations by themselves and by peers in the same courses. Elements of reproduction were reported but so too were innovation and experimentation by students, precisely to showcase their originality, considered to be a valuable trait by some students and a way of distinguishing themselves from other graduate students.

Vickers (Reference Vickers2007) conducted ethnographic research on L2 socialization in electrical and computer engineering team meetings at an American university, during which engineering projects were designed by student teams. A sample project was a device to render sound-producing devices mute. The instructors socialized students into the “industry” culture of teamwork in the engineering profession beyond university as well as within their program. “Efficiency, clarity, and engagement” (p. 628) in the design process were valued attributes of engineering students—and competent engineers—in the local academic and professional communities. Explicit advice to that effect was therefore pervasive. Vickers analyzed participation and relative expertise in managing the conversational floor in the design meetings, demonstrating how, linguistically, the more technically expert students initially assumed the role of information providers or explainers (socializers) to the novices, whose role it was to ask questions seeking technical information. With time and observation, experience, scaffolding, confidence building, and control over the content, the novices had learned enough technical content to themselves become information providers and to “think, design, and talk like a competent engineer” (p. 637). One new student had to “position himself as a competent, expert, core member of the team before he could take on the language behaviors typical of such team members” (p. 637).

Turning now to socialization within public school content classroom discourse, my research in grade 10 high school content-area classrooms in Hungary and Canada revealed how students were socialized into multimodal, intertextual, heteroglossic literacies and ways of knowing and speaking about history and social studies, respectively (Duff, Reference Duff1995, Reference Duff, Bailey and Nunan1996, Reference Duff2002, Reference Duff2004, Reference Duff, Barnard and Torres-Guzman2009; cf. Maybin, Reference Maybin, Goodman, Lillis, Maybin and Mercer2003). I examined teacher-fronted discussions and also student recitations and presentations in the form of mini-lectures. In the dual-track Hungarian-English bilingual schools in Hungary, the discourse in Hungarian-medium classes socialized students into a highly ritualized form of oral recitation similar in some ways to the sometimes nerve-wracking Socratic discourse practiced in law classes described in Mertz's (Reference Mertz2007) book. In the English-medium programs in Hungary, however, new, ostensibly more democratic discourse practices were being introduced, involving not only a different code choice (English) but also new genres (e.g., voluntary student mini-lectures, small-group discussions on historical topics such as the Russian Revolution, and only some years later, written essays) by means of which students could present their knowledge and teachers could assess it.

The most valued components of oral academic discourse became very clear in each setting, often in the form of feedback from the teacher. However, for many of the English language learners in the mainstream social studies classes who were analyzed, the vernacular discourse and pervasive extracurricular references (to The Simpsons and other iconic pop culture TV programs) were especially perplexing, and students were seemingly being socialized into the appropriation of two (diglossic) registers and not just one. Furthermore, students needed to learn how to make logical connections between topics from the news and other content and their academic material and also contribute to these discussions meaningfully, a very challenging prospect for newcomers to Canada without a strong command of English.

Socialization into Written Academic Discourse and (Inter)Textuality

Much of the early work on written academic discourse socialization, particularly at the postsecondary level, is not based on language socialization theory and research practice as developed by Ochs, Schieffelin, and others (e.g., Ochs, Reference Ochs, Schieffelin and Ochs1986; Schieffelin & Ochs, Reference Schieffelin and Ochs1986) but on compatible work in sociology, rhetoric, the history and sociology of science, and other traditions.

In-depth case studies and ethnographies have been conducted of individual learners and their interlocutors negotiating the textual requirements, and especially their own writing processes and struggles, across courses, or throughout the dissertation writing or publishing experience, in some cases longitudinally over one or more years (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, Reference Berkenkotter and Huckin1995; Berkenkotter et al., Reference Berkenkotter, Huckin and Ackerman1988, Reference Berkenkotter, Huckin, Ackerman, Bazerman and Paradis1991; Casanave, Reference Casanave and Murray1992, Reference Casanave2002; Casanave & Vandrick, Reference Casanave and Vandrick2003; Spack, Reference Spack1997). Leki (Reference Leki1995) examined the challenges faced by international students from Europe and Asia in their first semester at a U.S. university and their coping mechanisms including, in some cases, their resistance to professors’ demands or requirements rather than their accommodation.

Casanave (Reference Casanave2002) focused on academic and professional writing socialization at the postsecondary and professoriate levels. Dozens of key case studies in the field of L2 writing were reviewed, both those conducted by her (e.g., Casanave, Reference Casanave and Murray1992, Reference Casanave1998) and by others (e.g., Ivanič, Reference Ivanič1998; Prior, Reference Prior1998; Spack, Reference Spack1997). The studies dealt with such topics as plagiarism, agency, authority, authorship, authenticity in writing, doctoral student mentoring, article revising strategies, silence, power and (textual) identities, voice, disciplinary enculturation, experiences of multilingual writers, and resistance. The changing cultures and practices within and across disciplines such as sociology were also examined.

Academic enculturation or discourse socialization is viewed by Casanave (Reference Casanave2002) as a set of “writing games” (the title of her book) for which students and new professionals must learn the rules—or learn how to bend the rules—in order to participate and succeed. Several of the students profiled were in the field of sociology. Most of the studies look at the processes involved in writing papers as single-authors (acknowledging, however, that even single-authored papers blend many different voices and texts and may be coconstructed through interactions between supervisor and student or larger research team and students). A few studies (see Prior, Reference Prior1998) also deal with the processes involved in co-authored academic discourse, by groups of students and/or professors. Prior underscored the importance of textual practices and activities to disciplinary enculturation: “providing opportunity spaces for (re)socialization of discursive practices, for foregrounding representations of disciplinarity, and for negotiating trajectories of participation in communities of practice” (p. 32).

Too often it is taken for granted that language learners (and other newcomers) will be fully accommodated and apprenticed within their new communities and will also have ample access to the target discourse practices they are expected to emulate (Duff, Reference Duff2002, Reference Duff2003, Reference Duff, Marriott, Moore and Spence-Brown2007b; Haneda, Reference Haneda2006). Such assumptions of facile apprenticeship, accommodation and access are problematic in the light of evidence to the contrary (e.g., Belcher, Reference Belcher1994). Research has found, not surprisingly perhaps, that many instructors do not provide explicit and appropriate scaffolding, modeling, or feedback to support students’ performance of oral assignments (e.g., presentations, critiques, projects; e.g., Zappa-Hollman, Reference Zappa-Hollman2007a, Reference Zappa-Hollman2007b). It is simply expected that most students are already familiar with the genres required for academic essays or presentations and the criteria for evaluating them, even though these attributes and criteria may vary greatly from one context to the next.

Two dissertations demonstrate this point. Both examined academic literacy socialization from, or in, the margins—that is, the kinds of messages, intended or not, provided by instructors to nonnative English-speaking students, typically in the margins or at the end of their assignments or written drafts and their impact on the students (already at risk of being marginalized linguistically) who read the comments. Séror (Reference Séror2008) reported that the Japanese undergraduate students in his yearlong study in Canada were often deeply disappointed, confused, or simply not helped by the comments on their assignments, which were illegible and incomprehensible to many students; but beyond that, comments were often negative, terse, global, and uninstructive. He also observed how students were sometimes positioned disadvantageously by the instructors’ comments (e.g., as nonnative speakers and writers), denying the students any sense of legitimacy in their courses—or any possibilities for other identities, such as successful writer or insightful scholar or someone with a strong background in the content area.

Bronson's (Reference Bronson2004) multiple case study, also using ethnographic methods and language socialization theory, reached a similar conclusion, but by focusing on graduate students’ academic literacy socialization at a university in California. Both studies reported that the feedback provided was contingent on many other sociopolitical and socioeducational factors, such as the value and reward structures in place for teaching (as opposed to research) at the university, the instructors’ status and rank at the university, the number of students per course, the availability of teaching assistants, and other considerations, such as whether instructors felt qualified or obligated (able or willing) to assist students in their courses to become better writers (in both form and content) and whether students could locate good (peer) proofreaders or tutors. In some cases, it was reported, students received only a grade, but their articles were never returned. Opportunities for meaningful enculturation into written academic discourse were thus lost, to students’ great disappointment and detriment.

Zappa-Hollman (Reference Zappa-Hollman2007b), referred to earlier, examined the importance and density of Mexican undergraduate exchange students’ individual social networks and the other institutional resources they availed themselves of in both Mexico and Canada for their socialization into literate practices valued in the Canadian university context she studied. She also contrasted the academic cultures and modes of academic discourse socialization surrounding literacy and higher education in universities in the two countries as a way of explaining some of glaring differences and difficulties that students encountered. She then followed the students back to Mexico to determine what effect their English (Canadian) experiences had on their subsequent academic discourse socialization and performance in Mexico (e.g., they now felt the instruction in Mexico was unchallenging, required too many weekly assignments, and did not acknowledge them as mature and independent thinkers; they also reported transferring some process writing practices from Canada to their assignments in Mexico).

In a study summarized briefly in Duff (Reference Duff2007a), I found that, for many of the Korean undergraduate exchange students in a similar study, accessing suitable English-speaking or English-supporting networks was not at all straightforward for a variety of reasons (social, cultural, pragmatic). Most ended up seeking the assistance of bilingual and bicultural Generation 1.5 Korean Canadians or other Asian students as their socializing agents or cultural and linguistic brokers rather than local, native English speakers. The latter were often unable to provide the support needed. Their Asian-background peers, on the other hand, socialized them not into a local Anglo-Canadian university CoP so much as a Pan-Asian, transnational, multilingual one, a kind of hybrid/third space. Korean-Canadian Generation 1.5 university students, for their part, may also experience complicated, nonlinear trajectories as they are socialized into English academic discourse and communities; and as their investments in maintaining their bilingualism and biculturalism, and their identities, dominant languages, primary linguistic networks, and academic goals change over time. Kim's (Reference Kim2008) dissertation demonstrates this point very well with longitudinal data from seven Korean-Canadian case study participants.

In her discussion of the socialization of first-year law students into American legal discourse and into the law profession, Mertz (Reference Mertz2007) argued that the process entails not simply learning to write or read or speak like a lawyer, essential though these skills and discourses are for lawyers. Rather, the novice law students or initiates, as she called them, must learn, first and foremost, to Think Like a Lawyer—the subtitle of her book. The epistemologies, worldviews, and language ideologies underlying the behaviors she observed (e.g., the Socratic method of teaching) in her study of language use and interaction in contracts classes at eight different law schools strongly favored distancing oneself morally and emotionally from cases, tragedies, or conflicts. Instead, students were socialized into dispassionately interpreting and applying the letter of the law in what was presumed and claimed to be a neutral and technical manner. Philips's (Reference Philips and Spindler1982) earlier study examined the discursive socialization of U.S. law students into the legal cant, that is, the specialized, complex, and often publicly inaccessible or impenetrable legal terminology and discourse patterns, both oral and written, associated with appellate (case) law and practice.

Similar processes occur in other advanced degree and professional programs such as medicine. Using a discourse socialization perspective, Hobbs (Reference Hobbs2004) analyzed medical residents’ and doctors’ handwritten progress reports (treatment notes) as well as physicians’ implicit socialization into these practices and genres by means of their supervisors’ reviews and their concurrence on cases. The physicians’ progress reports she examined used a mixture of Latin, English abbreviations, and other symbols. To produce and interpret such reports accurately, and to develop their clinical judgment and expertise, physicians had to have considerable theoretical and clinical experience and enculturation.

The criteria for genres of writing in graduate school courses and for later writing may sometimes differ from actual practice requiring that people continue to be socialized or apprenticed into new target discourse practices in the professional workplace. Studies by Parks (Reference Parks2001) and Parks and Maguire (Reference Parks and Maguire1999) analyzed the important and pervasive genres of nursing reports and care plans taught in nursing programs for use by nurses during or at the end of their hospital shifts. However, the texts Francophone student nurses (in Quebec) had been socialized to produce in their study actually differed from those expected in either Francophone or Anglophone Montreal hospitals, requiring further socialization into workplace literacy practices.

In general, substantial discussion has focused on postsecondary language and literacy socialization, particularly in work coming out of academic writing. An edited volume by Australian scholars, Learning Discourses and the Discourses of Learning (Marriott, Moore, & Spence-Brown, Reference Marriott, Moore and Spence-Brown2007), highlighted many of the challenges associated with academic discourse socialization in a variety of program contexts in that country.

To date, less research has examined written academic discourse socialization at the elementary or secondary levels than at the postsecondary level. Poole (Reference Poole2008) illustrated the competing discourses of (so-called) decontextualized and contextualized language use in the literacy socialization of grade 5 students in reading groups in which nonfictional, illustrated essayist (expository) texts about dinosaurs, for example, were being discussed. Other work has looked at socialization into scientific discourse (e.g., Huang, Reference Huang2004) and religious as opposed to secular schooling contexts for school-aged learners. A special issue on the “spirit of reading . . . sacred texts” (Sterponi, Reference Sterponi2008) features work on Talmudic, Koranic, and Catholic (doctrina) text recitation and related code choice issues, particularly in multilingual contexts, as well as gender norms, the socialization of morality, and related issues (see Baquedano-López & Kattan, Reference Baquedano-López, Kattan, Duff and Hornberger2008; Fader, Reference Fader2001, Reference Fader2006; Garrett & Baquedano-López, Reference Garrett and Baquedano-López2002; Moore, Reference Moore, Duff and Hornberger2008).

In summary, a substantial body of new research exists on language socialization into oral and written discourse across an increasingly wide range of academic and educational discourse contexts. In the next section I consider emergent, blended, digital modes of communication.

Blurred, Blended or Hybrid Modes of Academic Discourse Socialization

Much academic discourse that takes place in the written mode is now mediated by electronic networks, and some genres represent a blend of oral and written discourse that permits the inclusion of graphics and hyperlinks as well. With an increasing number of mixed-mode courses offered at universities, involving both face-to-face and online discussion components, students and teachers have opportunities to participate in new kinds of discourse communities and new genres mediated by these new technologies. In her research in Canada on computer-mediated communication (CMC) in mixed-mode graduate courses in education, Yim (Reference Yim2005) found that students, both native and nonnative speakers of English, needed to learn appropriate roles, registers, and technological skills to participate in asynchronous, threaded, bulletin-board discussions related to course content. In one course, the instructor insisted on highly academic discourse and carefully formulated responses to course content, which all students struggled with to some extent. In another course, however, the instructor provided a more informal, interactional forum for discussion, and in that discourse community, students were socialized into different kinds of language use, pragmatics, and role-taking. The CMC speech functions there involved conveying knowledge and expressing opinions (initiating and reacting to postings), making requests for additional information and commands, and then using a range of social formulas or speech acts, such as greeting, thanking, acknowledging, and apologizing. Although the instructor set up the online component and offered suggestions for how the students would engage with it, the students really learned how to participate through observation of their peers’ interaction styles and registers. In the course that required less formal academic discourse, students produced more postings on average and reported feeling more ownership over their writing and also others’ writing. In the more formal environment, on the other hand, there was tension between the instructor's preferred style of communicating online and that of students, and an attendant lack of social formulas and positive appraisal of one another's messages. There was also resistance to this mode and register of socialization.

Potts (Reference Potts2005) also examined CMC discourse in mixed-mode graduate courses in language and literacy education and, similarly, reported on the bidirectional or multilateral socialization taking place as everyone in the discourse community over time, in response to others’ forms of participation, learned together how they wanted to communicate with one another. They negotiated, typically online, how to participate most meaningfully and also how to project their (desired) identities as intelligent, informed graduate students. One nonnative English speaker in the course reflected on her academic discourse socialization as follows: “I try to learn how . . . other participants post their message, and then I try to cite their postings into my posting, not exactly the expression, I try to imitate their style, their writing style and then I try to imply [apply] the way of writing into my posting” (p. 151). Deliberately analyzing, borrowing, and imitating certain others’ postings was commonly reported, reflecting their jointly achieved enculturation into a new educational mode for which the norms and conventions were still under negotiation (cf. Lu & Nelson, Reference Lu, Nelson, Casanave and Li2008).

Finally, Warschauer (Reference Warschauer2002) and Lam (Reference Lam, Duff and Hornberger2008) have looked at the role of online discussion and participation in other forms of electronic networking on students’ well-being and especially as it affects their academic literacies and identities. Clearly, research in this area will be of increasing importance in the future as greater collaboration in project work, report writing, presentations within and across communities and disparate mediating networks, and electronically mediated education becomes the norm rather than the exception.