Seminars as Communities of Practice: The Structural Analysis of Four Graduate-level Seminars and the Spoken Participation Experiences of International Students in a Canadian University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian universities and colleges are increasingly characterized by diversity. In academia, the number of individuals using English as an additional language (EAL) exceeds the number of scholars and students speaking English as their native language. However, previous studies have explored academic English among English monolingual speakers and many of these studies have focused on the written aspect while spoken genres such as seminars remain underexplored.This research is an embedded multiple case study that focuses on exploring the spoken participation experiences of EAL international students in four graduate-level seminars in a Canadian university. The research questions are: 1) How do four graduate-level seminar courses in Education in an English-language university differ in terms of their schematic structure, implementation, and instructor expectations for participation?; and 2) How do the EAL international student participants experience spoken participation in four graduate-level seminar courses? Each seminar course was conceptualized as a case and participants were embedded subunits of analysis. Data were collected using classroom observations, interviews, as well as physical artifacts and analyzed using genre and thematic analysis. Drawing on genre theory, community of practice, and landscape of practice, this study discussed how each instructor’s particular style of teaching and perception of their role in the classroom are reflected in the structure of each seminar course and closely associated with instructors’ different expectations for participation. These differences contributed to the confusion that student participants experienced. In addition, the international students encountered difficulties related not only to language, but challenges stemming from diverse understandings of spoken participation and classroom context-specific challenges. Thus, they perceived themselves as novice members of the community engaged in participation on the periphery as opposed to some of their classmates who were seen as more expert members. As this study highlights the varied structure of graduate seminars as well as the range of demands and participation expectations in seminars as elements that can contribute to spoken participation difficulties of international students, there are a number of implications that pertain to graduate program preparation as well as the professional development of professors in graduate programs that include international students.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".