CONVERSATION IN CMC – TRACING NOVICE AGENCY FROM A LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION PERSPECTIVE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADAUTE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAIʻI AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES (JAPANESE) December 2020 By Maiko Ikeda Dissertation Committee: Haruko Cook, Chairperson Shinichiro Fukuda Shoichi Iwasaki Marta González-Lloret Victoria Anderson Keywords: language socialization, pragmatics development, computer mediated communication, agency, Japanese sentence ending form © Copyright 2020 Maiko Ikeda All rights reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to the individuals who tremendously contributed to make this research and this dissertation possible. It was one of biggest decisions in my life to attend graduate school in a foreign country where I had never beeN to before. The decision I made at the time was because of faculty members who were respective pioneers in their research fields, and I am fortunate enough to have those very faculty support me on my journey towards graduation. I am very thankful that I could study as a student in their lectures. First, I want to express my deep gratitude to my advisor, Professor Haruko Cook, whose papers were cornerstones in my research decisions and whose support was always appreciated in difficult times. Professor Cook always encouraged me and supported me along my journey to obtain my PhD. Furthermore, her innovative lectures were instrumental in guiding my research for the many years I’ve been a part of the PhD program. I hold deep gratitude for her constant reviewal of my dissertation and insightful comments to help me in the revision process. Second, I would like to thank all my committee members. Professor Marta González- Lloret introduced me to the notion of CMC for teaching foreign languages, and through her classes, I became interested in examining CMC for teaching Japanese. I truly feel fortunate to be able to obtain guidance from a leading researcher in CMC and pragmatics such as herself. I am thankful for Professor Shoichi Iwasaki, who offered instruction of functional grammar, gave much insight on my analysis through its various stages. I am thankful for Professor Shinichiro Fukuda, who provided many detailed notes on my dissertation revision and from whom I learned a lot about the foundational basics of Japanese structure critical to my PhD studies at large. I also am appreciative for Professor Victoria Anderson, who kindly served as the University representative and provided a different and unique perspective on the issues taken up in my iii dissertation. Without the guidance of these faculty members, this dissertation would not have been written. Third, I am very grateful for my participants. Their participation in my study and willingness to provide data was the start of the whole dissertation, and I hope to have done them justice by creating a dissertation that can contribute to the pedagogy so critical for future Japanese learners. Even though each of them appears under a pseudonym, I deeply appreciate their cooperation. I am also thankful to my classmates and colleagues who helped me throughout my stay in the graduate division. While there are too many names to exhaustively list all, I am especially indebted to: Stephen Moody, who always ensured me I was capable of completing the dissertation and who gave me feedback on my English transcriptions; Martin Kristyn, who proofread the (many) early stages of my draft manuscripts and tripled checked my transcriptions and their English translations; Sean Forte, who I exchanged helpful discussions with on pragmatic competence and pedagogy; Joseph Iseri, who voluntarily reformatted my entire dissertation and provided a last-minute spelling and grammar check alongside looking at my transcription translations; Kent Kemp, who also took the time to proofread much of my dissertation; Anna Mendoza, Yi Ding, and Yunchuan Chen, who comprised the writing group that helped keep me motivated to finish my dissertation in tough times; and Hyunjung An, who always was up to walk and talk as a means to destress and maintain my mental health. Finally, I am most thankful to my parents and my sister, who always encouraged me in times of need and, despite my flaws, always believed in me to finish this long and arduous journey. Without their support, I would not have been able to make it. Thank you very much. iv ABSTRACT This dissertation examines how second language (L2) Japanese language learners exercise their agency in the language learning process in and how that use impacts their development of pragmatic competence within the language socialization (LS) process, with specific focus on selection and usage of sentence ending speech styles through online interactions with native Japanese university students. While the originators of LS carefully conceptualized the LS process as contingent, fluid, unpredictable, contested, and bidirectional (or multidirectional), the pioneer studies of LS have focused on how children and novices are socialized by their caregivers and experts. Consequently, this focus has created misunderstanding that LS emphasizes the reproduction of language, from expert to novice, as a successful and smooth process, where novices are mere passive receivers of knowledge from experts in order to functionally participate in the practices of their target communities. This complex process in which novices ratify, reject, and negotiate has to do with their agency, yet what novice agency is and its implication in the LS process has yet to be examined at any depth due to this narrower interpretation of LS. The present study responds to these challenges by examining how Japanese language learners develop competence to effectively and meaningfully participate in online class activities with native speaker university students over three months by analyzing both learners’ and native speakers’ agentive usage of Japanese sentence ending speech styles. To understand the process of their pragmatic competence development, this study quantitatively and qualitatively analyzes learners’ usage of speech style throughout the online activities in conjunction to semi-structured interviews with participants discussing their pragmatic choices in the data. The analysis on speech style usage shows learners of Japanese exert agency in a v multitude of ways within online interaction with their partnered native Japanese university students through selection of speech style, including strategies such as: shifting speech styles to initiate new context creation, persistent usage of a selected speech style that differs from that of native speaker’s and/or adoption of speech styles in relative synchronicity to native speakers’ selections. These findings indicate that not only do learners agentively select speech style, but also that such agency plays a significant role in their manipulation of linguistic form. Agency that exists extralinguistically, such as participation / non-participation in classroom-prescribed activities, also influences novice’s language learning outcomes. Finally, the findings prove that the LS process is contingent and bidirectional, and that novices, in this case learners of Japanese, actively organize and influence the LS process. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- iii ABSTRACT --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- v TABLE OF CONTENTS ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- vii LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES ----------------------------------------------------------------------- x CHAPTER 1 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK --------------------------------------------------------- 1 1.1. Introduction -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 1.2. Theoretical Framework of Language Socialization ---------------------------------------------- 3 1.3. Agency ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7 1.3.1. Properties of Agency ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8 1.3.2. Novice Agency within Language Socialization ------------------------------------------- 13 1.3.3. Examining Novice Agency on Studies of Multilingual and L2 Contexts -------------- 21 1.3.4. Summary of Agency in Language Socialization ------------------------------------------ 31 1.4. Organization of This Study ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 33 CHAPTER 2 JAPANESE SENTENCE ENDING FORMS ------------------------------------------ 36 2.1. Selection of Target Linguistic Resources -------------------------------------------------------- 36 2.2. Japanese Sentence Ending Forms: Desu/Masu Form and Plain Form ----------------------- 37 2.2.1. Plain Form with and without Affect Resources ------------------------------------------- 42 2.3. Summary of Sentence Ending Forms ------------------------------------------------------------ 43 2.4. Learner Development of Sentence Ending Form Usage --------------------------------------- 44 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 51 3.1. Introduction ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 51 3.2. CMC Setting -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------