Abstract Summary
In this session I provide a historical overview of how academic literacy research has examined multilingual speakers’ experiences over the last few decades, and offer the concept of “Individual Networks of Practice” (INoP) as a powerful theoretical and methodological construct to investigate socially-mediated learning from an ecological, holistic perspective.
Abstract :
Navigating unfamiliar social and academic spaces can be challenging for anybody, yet this can be even more so for newcomers faced with the extra difficulty of learning to function in an additional language. While valuable insights about the academic language and literacy development of English language learners have been gained through textual analyses of student writing and associated practices, such work tends to privilege the cognitive and procedural aspects of learning, often neglecting the role of social interactions - both inside and outside the traditional classroom learning spaces -- in mediating learning. Addressing this issue, in this session I provide a historical overview of how academic literacy research has examined multilingual speakers’ experiences over the last few decades, making the case for engaging in research that adopts a more holistic perspective in examining the socially-mediated nature of academic socialization. I then offer the concept of “Individual Networks of Practice” (INoP) developed by Zappa-Hollman & Duff (2015) as a powerful theoretical and methodological construct to investigate socially-mediated learning from an ecological, holistic perspective. After introducing INoP and its connection to Social Network Theory (SNT), Communities of Practice (CoP), and second language socialization theory (Duff, 2002; Duff & Talmy, 2011), I illustrate the kinds of insights that can be generated with INoP analyses, by drawing on an emerging set of studies that have used this concept to examine the experiences of multilingual international university students in various contexts. I conclude with suggestions to further develop the application of INoPs, both conceptually and analytically, and also share some concrete examples of how INoPs work has been used to better support multilingual students in the classroom and how it has also shaped faculty’s and staff’s ways of appreciating students’ challenges and needs, leading to the creation of helpful institutional resources.
