Academic Discourse Socialization of Graduate PhD Students

The present study explored the graduate students’ socialization through and to the oral academic discourse in the Department of Foreign Language Education (former ELT Department) in Northern Cyprus. Through an ethnographic design (comprising micro- and macro-perspectives) it provided attested discourse evidence and interview insights to the socialization experiences of the culturally and linguistically diverse candidates in the space of a graduate classroom, as well as across various spaces in the academic context. The results indicated that the students’ participation in the wholeclass academic discussions as well as outside the classroom discursive activities and practices was conducive to their gradual socialization to and through the oral academic discourse. Specifically, the students accrued epistemic stance, employed intertextuality, and constructed intersecting identities in that they enacted various discourse and situated identities as well as transported unique personal, academic and professional identities. The findings revealed that the socialization experiences of the PhD students were challenging, however rewarding in that they learnt to cope with their advanced academic studies through exercising their agency and were constructing academic identity as a form of competence in the graduate community. Keywords: oral academic discourse, participation, whole-class discussion, socialization, identity, novice/expert, intertextuality, stance, agency.