International students’ language socialization in New Zealand tertiary institutions: A spatial analysis

Abstract

Student mobility is part and parcel of internationalization of higher education in this globalizing world. Although previous research in language socialization has examined international students’ socialization at a discoursal level, this research drawing on Lefebvre’s (1991) triads of space, investigates the socialization of three international students who speak English as a second language (L2) at a New Zealand university at a spatial level. Students’ investments, positionings, negotiations in the perceived, conceived, and lived aspects of space are analyzed by taking into account these students’ challenges on a day-to-day basis in their new social spaces. Data are presented from diaries, interviews, class observations, field notes, video/audio recordings, class materials, and institutional documents. This research analyzes how the students negotiate discourses as they participate in the oral practices of their university courses. It further investigates how they construct their identities and how others construct these students’ identities in their classroom communities of practice. In addition, it examines these students’ imagined social space and its effect on their learning trajectories. The theoretical frameworks of language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986a), the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991), second language learning as identity construction (Norton, 2010), and the community of practice concept (Meyerhoff & Strycharz, 2013; Wenger, 1998) are drawn upon to present an ecological perspective of the identity construction of such students into their new, complicated academic spaces. By triangulating the data and bringing together the constructs mentioned above, this study provides us with analytical generalizations (Duff, 2008a) and sheds light on our conceptualization of experiences of second language learners’ identities in their new academic social spaces by introducing a novel way of looking at the theory of language socialization. Finally, this study compares the cases and makes suggestions for present and future international students, instructors, institutions that admit international students, and mentions future research pathways.