Under co-construction: An online community of practice for bilingual pre-service teachers

•An online community of practice (CoP) was co-constructed by bilingual pre-service teachers.•Membership categorization analysis (MCA) provided the fine-grained details about social interactions among participants.•Instances of mutual engagement and a joint enterprise were manifested in the online discussion data.•Affective stance was used as a shared repertoire among pre-service teachers.•Personal narratives, including multiple varieties of languages, were found in the online CoP.

With the advent of information and communication technologies, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has become a new medium for discursive interaction among learners in the classroom. In particular, an important extension of situated learning theory and community of practice for web-based communities has been a rapidly growing interest among researchers who are interested in how people socialize themselves into a discourse community in the online environment and how they use language to construct group affiliations and social identities. Using membership categorization analysis, this study aims to present the fine-grained details of participants' situated categorization practices in an online community of practice for bilingual pre-service teachers. Findings show how bilingual pre-service teachers utilized community-building features of mutual engagement, a joint enterprise, and shared repertoire proposed by Wenger's (1998) community of practice framework. Ultimately, this study argues for creating an online community of practice for culturally and linguistically diverse pre-service teachers that allows the use of multiple varieties of language, including their heritage language.