Masaru Yamamoto will be presenting his dissertation proposal on Monday, May 8, 2023 at 11:00AM in the Multipurpose Room (PCN 2012), with the option to attend online via Zoom.
For those who attend in person, there will be a light lunch afterward in the same venue. All are welcome!
Supervisory Committee: Dr. Patsy Duff (supervisor), Dr. Sandra Zappa, Dr. Scott Douglas (UBC-Okanagan School of Education)
Dissertation Title: Multilingual socialization within, across, and beyond social networks: Changing relationships, negotiating participation, and discourse practices during study abroad
Abstract:
Multilingual international university students have different kinds of social interactions and experiences as part of their socialization into new, additional-language (AL) communities. Interpersonal relationships—or social networks—constitute a vital source of academic and socioaffective support (Bankier, 2022; Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2015), symbolic and material resources (Inaba, 2020; Li & Gong, 2022), and opportunities for socializing interactions (Hasegawa, 2019; Hasegawa & Shima, 2020). Multilingual socialization is inherently sociorelational, and social networks exert a significant impact on the processes and outcomes of socialization. While some learners can benefit from their relational ties (e.g., with peers), others may struggle to negotiate access to new interlocutors and communities, and their discursive practices.
Language socialization researchers have increasingly begun to adopt a social network perspective as a versatile analytic framework for generating in-depth and sociorelationally sensitive understandings of the multifaceted complexities of multilingual socialization (e.g., Hasegawa, 2019; Zappa-Hollman & Duff, 2015). While previous studies have yielded valuable insights into the relational aspects of multilingual socialization, some methodological limitations need to be overcome (e.g., exclusive use of egocentric networks to date, limited temporal sensitivities, and relatively short research duration).
This proposed ethnographic multiple-case study foregrounds the sociorelational dimension of multilingual socialization experienced by undergraduate students on a year-long cohort-based study-abroad program between Japanese and Canadian universities and aims to address the limitations in earlier studies. Specifically, the study explores how students’ sociorelational experiences related to access, social identities, and participation and their micro-level discourse practices can be understood in relation to broader sociorelational contexts within which they are embedded. Data—generated through participant observations, semi-structured interviews, collection of cultural artifacts, digital recordings of in-situ interactions, and social network surveys—will be analyzed utilizing three mutually-informative analytic approaches: (1) social network analysis (Borgatti et al., 2018), (2) reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021), and a (3) micro-discourse analytic technique. The research findings have the potential to further our understanding of the sociorelational complexities of multilingual socialization in study abroad and perhaps other settings. In addition, the results might help reveal how multilingual learners’ sociorelational experiences can be supported by a wide variety of social(izing) actors/agents involved in study abroad and other additional-language programs in Canada and beyond.