While as both a theoretical lens and an analytic method, social network has usefully informed recent empirical research on how multilingual learners are socialized into academic discourse and practices in transnational contexts (Anderson, 2019; Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2015), little is known about the role of social networks in the process of academic socialization. Situated in a top-notch academic university with language and literature as its pillar discipline, the present study explores how eight multilingual learners construct their personal social networks over one academic year, and investigates the extent to which these networks facilitate or deter their academic socialization in the local community. Multiple data sources were combined to identify the compositional and structural characteristics of learner networks and their entailed outcomes, including Study Abroad Network Questionnaire, ethnographic interviews, participant observations, and media posts. Findings revealed that the types of networks learners formulated during the socialization processes were contingent on the linguistic and social resources they agentively assembled and used. Furthermore, learners' access to resources and their differing abilities to mobilize them contributed to networks that were formed along the continuum between homogeneity and heterogeneity, and might result in the degree to which learners were socialized into the local academic discourses. In particular, learners who developed dense networks with co-nationals were prone to insist on academic values of home cultures or resist the local academic norms, whereas those who built up networks with "structural holes", or unconnected members, were more likely to receive less redundant information and adapt to the local academic discourses and practices. The study calls for more research endeavors into social networks and academic socialization.
