Digital social reading: Exploring multilingual graduate students? academic discourse socialization in online platforms

Abstract

This qualitative case study explores academic discourse socialization in a digital social reading (DSR) plat-form through which nine multilingual doctoral students in a second language acquisition program in the U.S. annotated 11 scholarly articles asynchronously over four months. Data included students' DSR anno-tations, demographic information questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews and were analyzed via thematic analysis (Glesne, 2015). Through participating in the DSR activity, the students were socialized into: 1) discipline-specific terminology; 2) conventions of academic writing; and, 3) educational research design. To grasp the disciplinary terminology (e.g., agency), the students referenced the definitions of terms and concepts in the articles and built intertextual connections. Annotating the academic language use in the studies, the students became socialized into word choice and citation practice. Additionally, collaborative reading activity facilitated the students' socialization into data collection procedures. The study offers implications for implementing and exploring DSR platforms in higher education with multi-lingual learners.(c) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.