Formulaic language in oral academic discourse socialization of graduate students in a Northern Cyprus university

Abstract Socialization studies have emphasized the concept of indexicality, in that certain linguistic forms, having “salient social meanings and resonances” (Duff 2019: 12), are used to socialize novices to various social dimensions such as social roles, social statuses, power and social identities (Burdelski and Cook 2012). The present study explored, within the framework of second language socialization, how a group of graduate students in a non-western educational context were socialized to oral academic discourse in whole-class discussions through a specific type of formulaic language, lexical bundles. The study employed corpus techniques and conducted frequency and functional analyses of the attested data collected from whole-class discussions by a cohort of graduate candidates over one academic semester in a graduate English Language Teaching (ELT) course. The results of the study revealed that the graduate students used various lexical bundles with varying frequencies and functions that exhibited their socialization into the oral academic discourse of their graduate course community. The findings of the study offer some implications for the socialization role of lexical bundles to respective graduate community discourse in non-western tertiary contexts.