Society for Linguistic Anthropology

Volunteered - Oral Presentation Session

Competing discourses of proficiency and power: Heteroglossia and chronotope in language socialization in scientific activities

Language Socialization, Discourse, Intersubjectivity

Presenter(s)

• YL

  Yi-Ju Lai

  PhD candidate
  University of Minnesota

Higher education institutes have employed increasing numbers of multilingual international graduate students as international graduate instructors (IGIs). While language socialization research has documented IGIs’ socialization into academic discourses required for teaching discipline-specific knowledge (Duranti, Ochs, & Schieffelin, 2012), this work has rarely explored the dialogical nature of socialization between IGIs and diverse undergraduate students–– particularly, how socialization created through competing discourses between IGIs and students, with their use of languages, multimodalities, and lived experiences situated in different times-spaces.

Using Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism of heteroglossia and chronotope, this language socialization study examines how IGIs and undergraduate students co-constructed disciplinary expertise and memberships in instructional interactions in introduction to physics classes at a U.S. Midwestern university. Longitudinal, ethnographic data (e.g., audio-video recordings of classroom interactions) were analyzed using mediated discourse analysis method (Norris & Jones, 2005). I focus on the language- and multimodality-mediated socialization activities where both IGIs and students displayed epistemic stances to negotiate discipline-specific knowledge and ideologies. Findings reveal IGIs’ and students’ primary heteroglossic practices of physics, together with gestures and graphic representations of equations, established socialization contexts for meaning making in physics. This knowledge co-construction is an active process of (re/ pre)contextualization of physics discourses that is also mediated by IGIs’ and students’ spatial repertories. The (re/pre)contextualization is in part of the socialization process of becoming recognized members in physics at using appropriate contextualization cues. The dialogic nature of heteroglossia and chronotope in scientific socialization illuminates the competing discourses of proficiency and power between IGIs and students.