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Voices from across cultures: language socialization among college students in an English literature classroom and its ESL adjunct course

University of British Columbia

The purpose of this study was to explore the role that sociocultural context plays in college students' socialization into the classroom culture of a Canadian community college. To this end, it examined the nature of a college first year English literature classroom; the social, cultural, and academic values and norms promoted both explicitly and implicitly in that classroom; and the tasks designed by instructors to enable the students to achieve the stated goals of the course and their own personal goals. The study further explored the role of this literature class's ESL adjunct class in promoting language and cultural socialization, and examined similarities and differences in the socialization experiences of native speakers (NS) and non-native speakers (NNS) of English. This study employed an ethnographic approach and analyzed data mainly collected from classroom observations, video- and audio-taping of classroom tasks and activities, interviews with the instructors and students, and questionnaires. "Task" was the key unit of analysis, viewed from a language socialization perspective: tasks as sociocultural activities in which social and cultural components are embedded. This study was conducted over one semester (fourteen weeks); sixty-five lessons for the English literature class and twelve lessons for its adjunct were observed and video-taped. This study examined the planned curriculum and the lived curriculum of the literature. The qualitative analysis of these two curricula~planned and lived—suggested the complex nature of classroom culture created by its members' interactions with other members. The tasks embraced social, cultural, and academic values and norms; while engaging in these tasks, students learned academic language, reconceptualized their perspectives, and acquired socially-constructed knowledge. The study also described non-native speakers' difficulties, and suggested that the adjunct class provided them with scaffolding and facilitated their language socialization. Looking to the future, this study offers pedagogical implications for second-language learning and teaching: first, NNSs' communicative competence is socially constructed through interactions with NSs, and thus NNSs' language socialization should be examined in relation to that of NSs; second, classroom tasks are not culturally neutral; thus sociocultural perspectives must be considered when planning tasks; third, adjunct models are most effectively constructed from a sociocultural perspective. Finally, this study suggests that creating a dichotomy between NS and NNS, novice and expert, and North American culture and Asian culture oversimplifies the challenges of a classroom culture which is likely to place sociocultural, conceptual, and linguistic demands upon all students class in order to analyze social, cultural, and academic values and norms promoted in the class, and how students perceived these values and norms, created the classroom culture, and constructed knowledge.

Thesis/Dissertation

application/pdf

2009-03-11

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/5887

Language and Literacy Education

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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