Language Socialization into Academic Discourse Communities

Academic discourse, and especially English academic discourse, has been examined from a number of theoretical perspectives over the past two decades in applied linguistics, particularly at the postsecondary level (e.g., Hyland, 2006), socialization being one of the more recent. Basic questions this latter work addresses are the following: How do newcomers to an academic culture learn how to participate successfully in the oral and written discourse and related practices of that discourse community? How are they socialized, explicitly or implicitly, into these local discursive practices?