Moving Beyond the 'Newcomer' in University ESL Classrooms : A Working Paper

This working paper investigates students’ learning with regard to social participation as new community members in the ESL classroom context, as demonstrated in Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice. To make sense of communities of practice, newcomers are required to accustom themselves to the meaning and appropriate use of different semiotic resources of the communities (Halliday, 1978; Mickan, 2006). The participant as a newcomer attempts to understand the role of participation in the classroom community. People learn languages by interacting with others and making a community using real texts. The process of community building and participation is a natural process which people do every day, and these natural human activities influence students’ language learning. Our research sets out to investigate how newcomers become experienced learners through interactions in an ESL classroom community at a Japanese university, and it documents students‘ engagement in peer and classroom discussions. The inspiration for this research topic came from my own experiences of learning English and from a pilot study.