Masaru’s single-authored article, Multimodal academic discourse socialization: Examining geoscience students’ disciplinary knowledge construction and socialization at a Canadian university, has beed published in Applied Linguistics (Open Access).

Theoretically, this work seeks to extend the notion of academic discourse socialization (ADS; Duff, 2010; Kobayashi et al., 2017) not just linguistic but as inherently multimodal, reframing it as complex polysemiotic processes in which individuals come to develop, construct, and potentially transform norms, values, and communicative practices associated with their academic and disciplinary communities through the orchestration of diverse, situationally relevant meaning-making resources, such as linguistic (oral and written), gestural/embodied, visual, material, layout, and spatial ones that are available in their semiotic repertoires on a broad spatiotemporal scale.

Empirically, this ethnographic multiple-case study examines how undergraduate students are socialized into the disciplinary norms, values, and practices of a geoscience course through a range of multimodal practices, materials, and embodiment at a Canadian university.

See the abstract for more information:

Yamamoto, M. (2024). Multimodal academic discourse socialization: Examining geoscience students’ disciplinary knowledge construction and socialization at a Canadian university. Applied Linguistics, 45(6), 1050–1074. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amae060

Abstract: This ethnographic multiple-case study examines how undergraduate students are socialized into the disciplinary norms, values, and practices of a geoscience course at a Canadian university. Transcending logocentric assumptions about academic discourse, this article advances a broader domain of inquiry––multimodal academic discourse socialization––which foregrounds the polysemiotic nature of academic socialization. This approach examines not only linguistic but also a wider range of semiotic resources, including gestural, visual, material, and spatial ones, among others. To understand geoscientists’ disciplinary norms, values, and communicative practices, ethnographic data (classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, courserelated artefacts) were thematically analysed. Focal students’ geoscience poster presentation performances were also analysed using multimodal interaction analysis to scrutinize microlevel instantiations of disciplinary practices. Findings highlight how students were socialized into geoscience ‘observations and interpretations’ through a recurrent multimodal classroom activity, which was also reflected in micro-level multimodal practices enacted in students’ geoscience poster presentations. This study emphasizes that multimodal enactments constitute a crucial dimension of disciplinary practices and values connected with learning to think, view, and represent knowledge as geoscientists.

Acknowledgements: I am wholeheartedly indebted to my master’s and doctoral research supervisor, Dr Patricia Duff, for her invaluable guidance, constant encouragement, and insightful feedback on the original project and earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to express my appreciation to Drs. Sandra Zappa-Hollman, Ling Shi, and Scott Roy Douglas for their timely and helpful support as my MA and PhD committee members, as well as the co-editors of Applied Linguistics, and the four anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their constructive feedback. I am also grateful to the instructor and many emerging (geo)scientists in EPS 251, without whose generous cooperation this study would have never been possible. An early version of this paper was presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2021. The larger project was supported by a Graduate Student Research Grant from the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. I dedicate this paper to the loving memory of my late grandmother and three cats.