After the discussion of how language socialization recognizes the importance of investigating the sociocultural context of language development, this section will explain how this school of thought regards activity as a mediating role to transmit linguistic and sociocultural knowledge. According to sociocultural theories, sociocultural activity in which members of a social group actively participate is the basic unit of analysis. In L1 socialization, Ochs (1988) argued that children acquire linguistic and sociocultural knowledge through participation in socially and culturally organized activities or practices. She provides a model (Fig. 2.3) which illustrates that “activity mediates linguistic and sociocultural knowledge and that knowledge and activity impact each other” (p. 15). In other words, by engaging in activities, language acquisition means gaining not only linguistic knowledge but also sociocultural knowledge.
Linguistic knowledge activity sociocultural knowledge
Figure 2.3 Ochs’ Model for the Role of Activity in Language Socialization
The concept of activity found in L1 socialization is rooted in the work of Vygotsky (1978) who advocated the experimental-genetic method, which focuses on process and supplying maximum opportunity for learners to engage in a variety of activities. The Vygotskian School of psychology or sociohistorical approaches to cognitive development promotes the idea that higher mental functions of individuals develop through their participation in socially and culturally organized activities.
When implementing activities, language is seen as a tool used to engage in activities which mediate the development of higher mental functions. But how can this claim be related to language learning? As Lantolf (2000) indicated, the task of psychology
is to realize how human social and mental activities interact through “culturally constructed artifacts” (p. 1) whose fundamental concept of theory is mediation, i.e., symbolic artifacts—most importantly language—to establish a mediated relationship between individuals and the external world. Similarly, Schieffelin (1990) made the following statement to indicate two components of language socialization in terms of L1 acquisition, which appears appropriate to be applied to L2 socialization as well.
The study of language socialization has its goal of understanding how persons become competent members of their social groups and the role language has in this process. Language socialization, therefore, concerns two major areas of socialization: socialization through the use of language and socialization to use language. (p. 14)
Framed in this view, then, language is seen as a major and powerful medium of socialization, and by the same token, socialization is a key to language learning.
Therefore, from this viewpoint, learning is taken as a process mediated through activities and language. The present study also takes two assigned oral presentations as socially constructed activities constituting the basic unit of analysis. Specifically, examining the two oral presentation activities not only mediates language learning under a medical-content theme but also facilitates students to gain sociocultural knowledge in the English academic field. At the same time, students also learn some formulation of how to do an oral presentation by engaging in the oral activity.
2.3 A Community-of-Practice Orientation: Taking a Classroom as a Community
While drawing generally from the various sociocultural perspectives outlined above, we come to realize that this investigation focuses on language socialization theory: taking oral presentations as a socially constructed activity to fit the requirement of being a more competent academic member and viewing English as the major mediating language to construct sociocultural knowledge. In this section, another sociocultural theory will be discussed: community of practice (CoP). The present study views context as important in examining how students carry outactivities. In this study, context is defined as the classroom community in which activities are carried out. Central to this notion of classroom as a community, the section that follows will explain how this study uses Lave & Wenger’s idea of legitimate peripheral participation on learning.
2.3.1 The View of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (LPP) on Learning
Traditionally, the mainstream cognitive psychologists’ conceptualization of learning is regarded as an individual achievement. During the early ‘90s, Lave and Wenger’s (1991) revolutionary situated learning theory extended learning to involve the social nature of learning. For them, knowledge is not incrementally stored in the mind, but is the result of becoming involved in activities and located in societies.
Haneda (2006) interpreted Lave and Wenger’s idea in a very comprehensive way by saying that,
[I]ndividuals do not simply receive, internalize, and construct knowledge in their minds but enact it as persons-in-the-world participating in the practices of a sociocultural community. Accordingly, learning is an intrinsic and inseparable aspect of any social practice, not the goal to be achieved, and it occurs when people engage in joint activity in a CoP, with or without teaching.
(p. 808)
Such learning is what Lave and Wenger (1991) defined as legitimate peripheral participation (LPP). ‘Legitimate’ indicates that anyone could potentially become a member of a community of practice or in a discourse community. ‘Peripheral’
explains how the marginal participants, starting from peripheral to central, acquire knowledge through their involvement (i.e., participation) with activities or practices.
Gaining knowledge thus is viewed as a process, not a product. Therefore, treating learning as legitimate peripheral participation implies that learning is regarded as
“itself an evolving form of membership” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 53). Lave and Wenger view learning as an integral part of social practice. In their theory, learning cannot be separated from social context. Apprenticeships, which they regard as “a
common structured pattern of learning experiences” (p. 30), illustrate their theory of learning. They both believe that knowledge is not taught, nor examined, and neither is the apprentice of a mechanical copier of patterns. Learning is part of the apprentice’s everyday existence which does not happen in a formal educational setting.
Based on this rationale, Lave and Wenger (1991) gave examples of CoP from various scenarios: Vai and Gola tailors, Yucatec midwives, and meat cutters to explain how learning could possibly occur.
Through multiple social networks, relations and interactions with other members in a situated community, Lave and Wenger also argue that “identity, knowing, and social membership entail one another” (p. 53). In 1996, Lave further elaborated discourse on the fact that this connection entails that “crafting identities in practice becomes the fundamental project subjects engage in” (p. 157). This concept of multiple social networks also corresponds to what has been discussed elsewhere in the previous section, i.e., that first language socialization emphasizes the importance of formal education, whereas researchers in second language socialization, especially in a community-of-practice perspective, consider learning as occurring everywhere.
To summarize the above, socialization is not a matter of learning pre-determined knowledge or skills, but a back-and-forth process involving negotiating interactions, activities and practice; it is expected that learners can finally become a full-fledged member in the community of practice. Their relationship can be depicted as follows in Figure 2.4.
Figure 2.4 How Learning Occurs from a Community of Practice Perspective
From this figure, we can see that newcomers are seen as peripheral participants in their respective new communities who move from partial participation to full participation by means of the guidance provided by more experienced CoP members (referred to as “old-timers” in Lave and Wenger’s CoP theory). In the present study, we can view the instructor and experienced presenters as “old-timers”. However, traditional models of expert-novice relationships have been questioned, since the assumption that experienced individuals are experts and newcomers are novices.
But as Wenger’s (1998) later elaboration on multimembership indicated, community of practices can be accomplished through mutual engagement, joint activity involving a collective process of negotiation, and shared repertories. Why is the concept of
(a continu al process)
Central participants:
old-timers
Peripheral participants:
newcomers
Practices & activities
Social network
Interaction with others who are in this
community
Negotiating identities
A situated community
Emerging Constituent of Learning
The way to gain mem bership &
identity of mastery
CoP essential to the present study? First, the rationale of multimembership helps explain the blurred line between experts and novices. One may be an expert in one community but a novice in another community. With various identities in different communities, what is typically recognized as the expert-novice relationship is challenged. Therefore, it seems more appropriate to think of people’s negotiations in terms of their participation in multiple communities of practice.
To some extent, this viewpoint helps better define the dynamic negotiation relationship and shifting position between the instructor and students in the present study because of the nature of oral presentation and discussion tasks. In other words, the teacher is not regarded as the only authority and students are not viewed as playing only a passive role in learning. Since these students are socialized into many overlapping communities concurrently and equipped with several memberships at the same time, for example, different English-learning experiences, disciplinary communities with interns or in-practice doctors, or institutional or student associations in their own department, they thus may have several overlapping community identities. When students bring their own language proficiency, life experience, effort put in the course, and any other related professional medical knowledge to this class, they have their own expert perspectives. On the other hand, the instructor, who is typically regarded as the only authority in the traditional education model and the only socialization agent, has her own limitation (e.g., professional medical knowledge). Therefore, the interaction among the student presenter, student audience and the instructor, both inside and outside classroom, becomes an interesting issue to explore. At different times and on different issues, is their interactional mode uni-directional, bi-directional, or even multi-directional? In terms of language proficiency, the instructor owns her profession in academic language, but what about the content matter? When the instructor is not the only
resource, who takes over the status? By incorporating the literature of classroom interaction with the concept of multimemships of CoP, it is expected to shed light on a different view to re-examine the role of learners and instructors, as proposed as the second research question in this thesis, since such an issue is not touched upon by other language socialization studies.
2.3.2 Classroom as a Community
In this study, rather than proposing a broadly generalized term, academia, the observed classroom is limited as a small-scale community of academia. However, borrowing from the concept of community of practice, how can a language classroom be seen as an academic community? At first, Breen (2001a) argued that classrooms are specific cultures and need an anthropological approach to understand socio-cognitive processes. In order to understand the formal learning of language, Breen (2001b) called for an understanding of classroom discursive practices, demonstrating that it is important to consider classrooms as a form of social practice.
He places special emphasis on “social relationships” as these, which, in his view, can orchestrate opportunities for learning. In much the same way, Roberts et al. (2001) claimed that by looking at everyday life culturally and ethnographically, language learners can be taught methods for investigating the cultural and social patterns of interaction and the values and beliefs that account for them.
Drawing from their perspectives, there are at least three ways to think of the classroom as an academic community. First of all, the characteristics of this course constitute an essential entry point for medical students into a medical-disciplinary community. In this course, community learning is a “shared and connected”
behavior (Tinto, 1997, p. 54) on a theme-based ground. That is, this learning community is organized around a central subject (i.e., medical content in this study).
Second, this theme-based course itself constitutes distinct communities of practices
and activities, in which learners fulfill the same requirement, achieve the same pedagogical goal and seek membership. In this sense, the classroom becomes a place where students learn to become effective members. Hence, this course is designed to simultaneously teach both content and language for a homogeneous group of learners who share the same goal for learning English, for which the context ranges from an academic to occupational setting (Dudley-Evans & St John, 1998).
Finally, and probably most importantly, members constitute a society or a community where mutual learning occurring between an individual and his peers becomes the influencing power of learning and participating in a community of practice. Framed in a sociocultural view, Vygotsky (1978) constructed the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) stating that “children develop social and cognitive skills through participating in structured cooperative interaction with more mature members of society” (Ochs 1986, p. 6). Thus, from this view, learning cannot occur alone. Duff (2007) added that,
Experts or more proficient members of a group play a very important role in socializing novices and implicitly or explicitly teaching them to think, feel, and act in accordance with the values, ideologies, and traditions of the group.
However, novices also ‘teach’ or convey to their more proficient interlocutors what their communicative needs are, and the process of socialization is therefore seen to be bidirectional—or multidirectional if multiple modes of expertise co-exist. (p. 311)
In this sense, rather than taking assimilation as an automatic process, I accept the premise that discourse socialization is an interactional and dynamic process which is locally situated in communities across disciplinary social activities which are mediated through the use of English. In this perspective, the participants and the discipline-related activities have been variable foci for analyses and are shown to be interactively linked one to another. In this study, the researched classroom is viewed as a medical academic community where the medical students are socialized to fulfill the requirements of being successful oral presenters for academic purposes. Oral
presentations are therefore regarded as a social activity in the classroom community.
2.4 Second Language Research on Oral Academic Discourse
In this section, I will review how oral academic discourse has been explored in the last two decades. Firstly, in Section 2.4.1, a summary table is presented to document the changing research trends on oral academic discourse and different research methodology orientations. By synthesizing and comparing these studies chronologically, we can see different research orientations: topic development across different phases, and shifting research methodology from a quantitative (e.g., linguistic pattern analysis) to a qualitative orientation (e.g., what an individual experiences throughout the learning process). Furthermore, in current studies, researchers pay more attention to how contextual factors (e.g., political decision) influence individual’s learning. In other words, language learning and context are treated as interrelated and thus the acquisition of language is embedded in the socialization of knowledge. By reviewing all these studies, I will outline some research gaps existing in this body of literature in Section 2.4.2. Finally, I narrow my focus specifically to studies related to the main oral activity in the present study:
oral presentation. It appears that in the existing literature, research on oral presentations is very limited since most surveyed studies are related to pedagogical implications, as we will see in Section 2.4.3.
2.4.1 Research on Oral Academic Discourse
A discourse community is a group of people who share a set of social conventions directed towards some purpose (Swales, 1990), so this group of people recognizes mechanisms of communication among themselves. While communicating, one or more genres are used to achieve successful comprehension in particular disciplines. Examples of discourse communities are cardiologists, electrical engineers, doctors, or lawyers. In terms of studies of academic genre,
research on discourse communities has been divided mainly into two categories:
written and oral perspectives. Comparing quantity of studies in these two perspectives, research into discourse features of written genres has been much more extensive; in particular, investigation into patterns and features in specific academic and professional genres has nourished pedagogy over the past two decades (Basturkmen, 1999; Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990). However, only a few academic spoken genres have been explored. Although less explored so far, some studies, focusing on the oral discourse needs of non-native English speakers (NNESs) in an English-learning or English-speaking academic setting, can be discussed.
To begin with, I will present a review second language research on oral academic discourse in the last two decades through a summary table (Table 2.1), and closely examine how the oral research trend has transformed its foci. As shown in the chronologically ordered table, in the 1990s, due to the emergence of the ESP movement in the late 1960s, L2 studies concerned themselves more with relevance to learners’ needs which, in turn, directed curriculum and syllabus design. Research on the oral aspect is also directed by the ESP trend.
From the first two categories in Table 2.1, we can see that researchers at that time tended to explore issues about needs analysis and oral discussion in EAP or ESP across disciplines, both of which were strongly related to the concept of ESP or EAP needs. For example, in an investigation of the graduate seminar as a speech genre, Weissberg (1993) employed a qualitative design to analyze participants’ language use, the structure of their seminar presentation, and to explore the specific demands that posed for the NNES graduate students in graduate courses in the departments of animal science and agronomy. Furthermore, he compared the generic difference between the seminar presentation and the research article, in other words, spoken versus written texts. More significantly, the study revealed differences in the option
of speech style chosen by both native and non-native English speaker learners. From this finding, two factors were identified which showed why NNESs face more challenges in oral tasks: first, lack of linguistic knowledge; and second, different notions of what constitutes acceptable academic speech.
In the implication for pedagogy derived from the study, Weissberg contended that
It is wise to evaluate the kind of ESP preparation, if any, that NNS students received for the graduate seminar and formal academic speech events in general.(…) [I]t is not reasonable to expect that all, or even many, students simply “pick up” the associated oral genre on their own. Non-native speakers who are uncomfortable with their oral skills in English may be specially inclined to memorize a written text for their presentations. (p. 33)
In this quote, he specifically points out non-native speakers’ dilemma to accommodate oral academic discourse and also calls for the necessity to prepare academic-specific courses for students because it is not a naturally pick-up process for learners. Rather, it takes a planned learning process for learners to cultivate themselves to be more competent academic members in their own professional fields.
In the third category, we can see that researchers have gradually moved their foci to task-based research. They have found it is useful to employ a task-oriented perspective in work on second language acquisition. In order to better understand and document how learners structure interlanguage over time, second language researchers and teachers intend to seek samples (i.e., taking task as a unit for analysis) of language use from learners. By eliciting samples of language use, researchers and teachers can probe why students cannot attend to accuracy. With this attempt in mind, several typical examples of SLA research tasks are similar to negotiation of meaning, the framework of the input and output hypothesis, and the interaction approach. This has also occurred in oral academic discourse studies as well.
Student oral tasks in the classroom have received increasing attention as a unit of analysis. But if we take a closer look, what makes these studies different from most
task-based research done in the 1980s is that they have shifted their attention to look into affective and social variables (Dörnyei & Kormos, 2000; Parks, 2000; Swain &
task-based research done in the 1980s is that they have shifted their attention to look into affective and social variables (Dörnyei & Kormos, 2000; Parks, 2000; Swain &