ACADEMIC SOCIALIZATION AS A WAY TO GET INTEGRATED INTO THE GLOBAL ACADEMIC COMMUNITY

Social adaptation of an individual in modern society is an issue of great importance. Scholars interpret socialization as a process, condition, manifestation, and the result of social maturity of personality. The role of foreign language in socialization is substantiated in the Conception of the education system modernization. It defines a foreign language as the discipline that ensures the successful socialization of students in a multi-polar and multicultural society and as a way of preserving spiritual culture of the society. Discursive and communicative resources of bilingualism in the modern global world allow solving a number of the important tasks, namely to provide fast integration into the information environment; to carry out real inter-lingual communication in different social conditions; to implement bilingual socialization; to overcome negative stereotypes about other cultures; to form one’s own social identity.

The key findings of the in-depth analysis of the issue under discussion argue that in the conditions of globalization a new type of global bilingualism is being developed, which can be defined as a socially-conditioned, communicative and pragmatic bilingualism of modern times. As a result of integration processes in the world, there has developed a universal language of research, science, and education and it has given rise to the development of the social bilingualism, characterized by steady growth in terms of both the coverage of the population on the planet and the improvement of language proficiency.

The main argument of traditional language socialization theory is that people learn a foreign language to socialize and socialize to use language appropriately. This way, they gradually start functioning as competent members of a society [4].

The subject matter of this study is academic socialization – the perspective that specifically highlights socialization in an academic context. Academic socialization analyzes how an individual’s socialization is influenced by discursive practices and interactions with various members of his or her academic community [3].

Specialized university courses teach graduates through language to learn to think and behave appropriately and get accepted by a specific academic community. To become competent members, students need to learn academic discourses and conventions acknowledged in western academic communities.

In academic contexts, novices learn and practice academic discourses, defined by Duff (2010) as «forms of oral and written language and communication – genres, registers, graphics, linguistic structures, interactional patterns» [2; p. 175], and then they participate in academic communities through interactions with their professors, peers, and other more experienced members.

Advanced academic literacy studies suggest that students' academic literacy development can be viewed as «socialization» into the academic communities to which they belong. According to Morita (2004), there are two lines of research on socialization in academic writing: one focuses on the «product», and the other on the «process»[3]. Studies focusing on the product connect written texts with the concept of academic discourse communities. A «discourse community» is conceptualized as a collective thought or like-minded peers, sharing the same underlying assumptions, communicative purposes, and rhetorical conventions, and it is not necessarily constrained by physical boundaries. Concrete examples of discourse communities in academia, that is, academic discourse communities, include specific academic disciplines and sub-disciplines. The popular area of EAP studies in this line of research is the genre-based approach, which identifies textual features of various genres of academic writing (e.g., abstracts, research papers) and connects them with social and communicative purposes within specific academic discourse communities. In this line of research, academic socialization refers to students' mastery of rhetorical features specific to the expectations of their academic discourse communities.

Another issue of research on socialization in academic writing concerns the process in which students are socialized. Those studies refer to communities, but their concept of community is related to the framework of «communities of practice» [5] in which members participate in social practice under and toward a joint enterprise. The communities of practice in which students participate include university classrooms, academic programs, and departments. Even disciplines and sub-disciplines can constitute communities of practice, but it is students' participation in the practices of those communities (e.g., discussing discipline-specific issues with fellow students and professors in the discipline) that matters. The concept of community of practice is different from that of an academic discourse, which implies that the abstract notion of the community is there, regardless of students' interaction with or involvement in it. In the process-oriented studies, academic writing is viewed as «situated social practice» [1], an activity situated in various communities of practice.

To prepare for writing the article, the scientific advisor invites a student to discuss the findings of the pilot study and the conclusions drawn from it. In the course of the discussion they ask questions and probe further, exchange ideas about how social class can be theorized, and share readings with each other. They discuss the strengths and limitations of a student’s framework, and explore the perspectives. When it comes to citing the work of others, students encourage the advisor/tutor to think about the community of scholars they want to be a part of. The supervisor advises young researchers to understand the article as a conversation and ask themselves with whom they wanted to have that conversation. Thus the draft of the study can be significantly improved. While the supervisor generally transmits ideas to the student in academic socialization, the process of collaborative writing, on the other hand, involves coauthors recognizing the capital ideas each one brings, thus allowing these two processes to converge, as student and supervisor share knowledge and competencies to produce written academic discourse.

Academic discourse socialization is a dynamic and complex process. Learners internalize the practice of the academic fields through the participation in the discussions with more competent members of social groups. As novices in the academic community, less proficient learners acquire the knowledge of academic discourse from the interaction with experts in their field. This kind of interaction is defined as a bidirectional process: both novice learners and experts can learn from each other.

References:

1. Casanave, C. P. (2002). Writing games: Multicultural case studies of academic literacy practices in higher education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
2. Duff, P. (2010). Language socialization into academic discourse communities.  Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 30, 169-192
3. Morita, N. 2009. Language, Culture, Gender, and Academic Socialization. Language and Education 23 (5): 443–460. doi:10.1080/09500780902752081.
4. Ochs, E., and B. B. Schieffelin. 2012. “The Theory of Language Socialization.” In The Handbook of Language Socialization, edited by A. Duranti, E. Ochs, and B.B. Schieffelin, 1–21. West Sussex: Blackwell.
5. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.