Enculturation into Discourses by East Asian Students in a Graduate TESOL Program

Abstract

Through multiple case studies, this article examines the learning experiences of three Korean students in a MATESOL program and how they made sense of the Discourses (Gee, 1996) that they encountered in their course work. The students experienced enculturation on three interrelated dimensions: disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural knowledge, the latter two initially posing the greatest difficulty. The Discourse(s) that they experienced appeared to be a mixture of professional and academic Discourses. However, this hybridity did not seem to be explicitly recognized either by the entering students or even by the contributing faculty, which resulted in feelings of uncertainty among the students.