U.S. higher education has employed increasing numbers of multilingual international students as international teaching assistants (ITAs). While language socialization research has documented how newcomers (e.g., ITAs) socialize themselves and are socialized into the academic discourse practices required for teaching discipline-specific knowledge and communicating with U.S. university students, this line of research has rarely studied unexpected developmental trajectories, or “bad subjects”– newcomers who do not respond in socially sanctioned ways (Kulick & Schieffelin, 2006). Recent language socialization work shows a growing interest in using scholarship of academic voices to re-conceptualize socialization process as both a conduit of transformation and source of change, and to address subtle changes in micro interactions and macrosociopolitical ideologies (Duff, 2010).
Using Bakhtin’s (2006) notion of voice, this language socialization study examines how ITAs construct and negotiate their disciplinary expertise and identities in instructional interactions with U.S. university students in undergraduate-level physics and aerospace engineering classes at a U.S. Midwestern university. Ethnographic data (e.g., audio-video recordings of classroom interactions) was conducted during an eight-month period in 2016-2017. Van Leeuwen’s (2007) concept of “legitimation” was used to closely analyze classroom problem-solving activities where both ITAs and their U.S. university students demonstrated their agency to display epistemic stances, and negotiate and legitimize discipline-specific knowledge and ideologies. Epistemic markers that are commonly used in socialization activities to index ITA participants’ standpoints include a syntactic structure of pronouns and agentive verbs (I suggest if-complement) or partial repeat of the trouble-source turn plus a question marker (This equation, why?). This study suggests that the juxtaposition between content experts and language novices creates interactional consequences for ITAs’ instruction and their situated identities as course instructors vulnerable for negotiation of their disciplinary knowledge and identities.
Bakhtin, M. M. (2006). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (Vol. 1). University of Texas Press.
Duff, P. A. (2010). Language socialization into academic discourse communities. Annual review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 169-192.
Kulick, D., & Schieffelin, B. B. (2006). Language socialization. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 349-368). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2007). Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse & Communication, 1(1), 91-112.
