Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

Language Socialization 443
However, the process may not be as successful or seamless for less
established members of communities, ethnolinguistic or socioeconomic
minority-group members or others who wield less power, less experience
and fewer symbolic and material resources within their new educational
and linguistic communities, or may be in postcolonial situations where
they do not have suffi cient background in the dominant language to enter
into educational discourse (Bronson & Watson-Gegeo, 2008; Moore, 1999,
2008; Watson-Gegeo, 1992). Unfortunately, even a short-term lack of success
for some of these students may result in such confusion, embarrassment
and disappointment that they withdraw from the schooling
experience completely.
Several intersecting factors may account for the diffi culties these students
face. One is that the target language, variety, register or activity
(speech event, act) is not familiar to them and they lack the schemata
(background cultural knowledge) and scripts (knowledge of routines) to
perform as expected. For example, recent study-abroad research has
shown areas in which international exchange students’ previous homecountry,
fi rst-language-mediated socialization into academic literacy practices
and expectations held by their local teachers may differ substantially
from those of their new host institutions and they may fl ounder as a result
(Zappa-Hollman, 2007b).
A second factor is that teachers, mentors and peers may simply assume
that new linguistic and cultural practices and the background knowledge
associated with them are obvious, comprehensible, transparent, already
known or easily acquired and engaged in by newcomers, when in fact
they are not. That is, the ‘experts’ (the primary agents of their academic
discourse socialization) may not realize that the practices are alien, even
for students who come from the dominant culture, such as middle-class,
educated native-English speakers entering undergraduate or graduate
school in Anglophone Canada or the United States. These students may
have been academically successful enough to enter their university programs
but may not have had experience giving particular types of oral
presentations (e.g. the summary and critique of a research article), may
not have used PowerPoint and other presentation technologies before, or
may not have used mixed-mode course tools requiring online bulletinboard
postings in response to class discussions and readings (Duff, 2007b;
Morita & Kobayashi, 2008; Yim, 2005). They may never have written an
academic literature review paper as prescribed in their courses, or a
research proposal or an academic curriculum vita (Séror, 2008). Such students
may need very explicit instruction and models related to the criteria,
components, optimal performance, length restrictions, citation conventions
(such as ‘APA’), and other attributes of the target activity.
A third factor is that, despite teachers’ usually very good intentions,
students may be positioned in disadvantageous ways in courses, to the