Constructed dialogue as a resource for promoting students' socialization to written academic discourse in an EAP class

This article examines how a professor in an advanced English for Academic Purposes (EAP) course promotes her students' socialization to written academic discourse through what she says in class. Drawing on a corpus of teacher-student interactions in 12 class sessions, the paper focuses on the professor's use of “constructed dialogue” (Tannen, 1989), also referred to as direct reported speech or quotations, during her classroom talk. Close analyses of the professor's discourse reveal that she frequently constructs the speech of “writer” and “reader” of academic texts in order to subtly convey to students both the intellectual and social dimensions of the academic writing and reading process. The paper goes on to show that by fabricating and enacting the speech of writer and reader as engaged in this mutually dependent process, the professor both dramatizes and demonstrates the socio-cognitive nature of academic writing and reading, thereby supporting similar points she makes more directly in class.