L2 Academic Discourse Socialization in a US Chinese Language Flagship Program

Focusing on a group of learners enrolled in a master's Chinese Language Flagship program at a Midwestern university in the US, the current study attempts to reveal the academic discourse practices promoted in the Flagship program and uncover the multiple levels of practices instructors do to socialize the students to become competent members of the target academic community.Informed by the theoretical framework of language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986), this study adopts an ethnographic design to collect audio and video recordings of class interactions in two graduate seminars, semi-structured interviews with students and instructors, and participant observation field notes.The analysis reveals two important practices, academic oral presentation, and Sòng or group recitation of Classical Chinese phrases, as loci and resources for students' discourse socialization.While the two courses share a similar instructional sequential structure that entails pre-class scaffolding, performance elicitation, and feedback, they are enacted in different ways and for different purposes.On a microlevel, teachers often initiate shifts between content-focused and language-focused activities to fulfill the program's goal to promote language and domain proficiency development.The findings suggest that L2 academic discourse socialization is a complex and contextualized process that involves moment-tomoment, dual-or multi-level negotiation of expertise.