Language Socialization In Junior Middle School EFL Classroom In China

Recently, language socialization (LS) has become a vigorous research field. However,in China, only a handful of papers concerning in LS, while none of which investigatesinto the LS of English learning in China. Thus, this study intends to reveal how studentsget language socialized through teacher-student’s interaction, classroom activities andteacher directives.Three junior middle school English classes have been selected. In the research, bothqualitative and quantitative approaches are employed, while the former one plays thedominant role. The discourse is analyzed from three aspects: teacher-students interaction,classroom activities and teacher directives.The major findings in this study can be summarized as the following points: first, theinvestigation of classroom interaction has proved the existence of LS, and demonstrateshow LS takes place implicitly and explicitly through interaction. Also, the study verifiesthat teacher’s proper use of initiation and follow-up turns in IRF routine would helpstudent’s LS; second, the study has also found out that student’s LS can take placeimplicitly and explicitly through classroom activities as well; third, the study finds outthat these Chinese native EFL teacher’s use of directives have been affected by theirmother tongue.This study not merely sheds light on language teaching that first, teacher’s proper useof initiation, follow-up turns, as well as well-designed classroom activities would benefitto student’s LS; second, EFL teacher should be aware of the differences between nativelanguage and the target language in the use of directives, the proper use of which will alsohave contribution to student’s LS. Meanwhile, it is hoped that this study would more orless bring some focus to researchers in China on the subject of language socialization,which undoubtedly would be a fruitful field to investigate.