This study explored oral academic discourse socialization experiences of doctoral students at an English-medium tertiary institution in Northern Cyprus. It was a qualitative study involving audio-recording of a graduate class oral academic discourse and conducting interviews with the graduate candidates. Analysis of the oral academic discourse data showed that through participation in academic discussions the students negotiated their knowledge, constructed identity and agency. Analysis of the interview data also suggested the graduate candidates’ identity and agency co-construction as well as the novelty of the graduate candidates’ challenging socialization experiences over their academic studies in the graduate context. Overall, the study seemed to indicate that the participants’ socialization experiences facilitated their academic learning and development of academic discourse competence. The results of the present study are discussed in relation to the pertinent research to date.

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.

With the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, educational institutions had to make swift educational decisions such as emergency blended synchronous education without thoroughly scrutinizing its effects. This study explores the experiences of a group of seven EFL teachers of a blended learning model during the pandemic in Northern Cyprus higher education. The study adopted a qualitative design by interviewing seven teachers on their experiences during the pandemic, particularly focusing on a blended instructional mode of education over the fall academic semester in 2020. The study results reveal that the study participants employed various strategies to cope with the challenges ascribed to the blended mode of delivery. The study's findings offer some implications for second language teachers and the use of technology in second language education. Keywords: EFL teachers, challenges, emergency blended synchronous education, blended education

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Lexical bundles, as fixed-form recurrent word combinations of multiple words (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999), have been documented to play an important role “in the fluent linguistic production and a key distinguishing feature of particular modes, registers and genres” (Hyland & Jiang, 2018, p. 383). A number of studies have found that second language learners experience difficulties while using bundles by misusing, overusing or underusing these bundles in their writing (Ädel & Erman, 2012; Hyland, 2008b; Wei & Lei, 2011). However, despite an extensive number of studies conducted on the use of lexical bundles in various fields, there is still paucity of research into the use of such linguistic devices across various disciplines, particularly in the Iranian context. Therefore, by adopting a corpus-based analysis approach, this study explored the frequency, functions and structure of 4-word lexical bundle use across four different disciplines (business and tourism as soft sciences, and mechanical engineering and civil engineering as hard sciences, see Hyland, 2008b) in the master theses of native English-speaking writers and Iranian L2 writers. For this purpose, two corpora, each containing 60 master theses totaling 120, were selected. The findings of the study revealed that, in total, Iranian writers incorporated more lexical bundles in their texts than their native English counterparts and that its use varied functionally and structurally across not only native and nonnative corpora but also across disciplines (soft and hard sciences). The study has important implications for Iranian L2 writers of the respective disciplines as well as genre-based instruction in English for both academic and specific purposes.