Learning as changing participation: Identity investment in the discursive practice of a peer feedback activity

Abstract

Through the lens of a community of practice as a social learning system, this article analyses the peer interactions of a group of four college learners of English as a foreign language in a peer feedback activity with the focus on the writer – the top student, Wang. The study uses an ethnographical way to interpret Wang’s discourse actions in participation in a learning group of four as part of the English-classroom community of practice. The focus of the analyses is on the practices for understanding how Wang constructed her identities as a way of participation; how she, as well as the other learners, identified with the practices; how the peer feedback activity as a social learning system worked; and what Wang learned from it. The study witnesses three modes of Wang’s identification with this local English-learning community of practice (engagement, imagination and alignment); her changing participation in terms of modulating her identity investment in the social practice (as a master, novice and non-participant); the different meanings negotiated or circulated in the learning system (linguistic, social, interpersonal, etc.); and the implicit as well as explicit knowledge Wang may learn from it.

Introduction

Since Vygotsky’s (1978, 1986) sociocultural theory was published, there have been various related studies, and the concept of the zone of proximal development has been interpreted differently in psychology and sociology. The representatives in psychology are Lantolf and his colleagues (Lantolf and Appel, 1994; Lantolf and Beckett, 2009; Lantolf and Thorne, 2006; Poehner, 2012). They held that the zone of proximal development is ‘the distance between problem-solving abilities exhibited by a learner working alone and that learner’s problem-solving abilities when assisted by or collaborating with more experienced people’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 48). They emphasize the processes of internalization or development from the interpersonal to the intrapersonal (Vygotsky, 1978). On the other hand, sociologists, represented by Wenger and his colleagues (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Kanno and Norton, 2003; Norton, 2001; Pavlenko and Norton, 2007; Song, 2012; Wenger, 1998; Wu, 2005), interpreted the zone of proximal development as ‘the distance between the everyday actions of individuals and the historically new form of the societal activity that can be collectively generated as a solution to the double bind … in everyday actions’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 49), which focuses on processes of social transformation in the interpersonal process. One of the key concepts of the sociological perspective is the community of practice (CoP), which has triggered a number of studies in the field of second or foreign language education. However, these studies mostly still bear the mark of the psychological perspective, with its focus mainly on learners’ target-language-related cognitive development – the acquisition of the target language or a specific competence or skill in it – in CoPs over a long period of time in a longitudinal process (Cekaite, 2007; Hellermann and Cole, 2008; Samimy et al., 2011; Umino and Benson, 2016; Vickers, 2007). In these studies, the social realm was interpreted as the background or ‘a small aura of socialness’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 48) that provides input or target-language practice for the process of internalization, rather than being viewed as ‘an integral part of cognitive development itself’ (Mondada and Doehler, 2004: 501). Others comment on the concept of the CoP as an ideal learning environment, ignoring the unequal power relationship of a community (Haneda, 2006), or provide empirical support for how an unequal power relationship affected learners’ legitimate peripheral participation (Morita, 2004; Shi, 2011). This criticism is based on a broad understanding of Wenger’s concept of a CoP and its related concepts, and does not distinguish between community and CoP, and the two kinds of power, from horizontal and vertical responsibilities respectively, as seen in Wenger’s (2010) response to this criticism, where he defined a CoP as an empowering learning environment characterized mainly by the horizontal responsibilities of the participants. Since then, there have only been a few studies conducted from this perspective in the field of second or foreign language education (e.g. Cho, 2016; Shi and Yang, 2014; Zheng, 2012; Zheng and Huang, 2017), although the concept is widely used in the educational and organizational learning setting (e.g. Butin, 2010; Draper, 2013; Eberlea et al., 2014; Gan and Wen, 2011; Hou, 2015; Khalil et al., 2017) – hence the production of this article in Wenger’s sense of a CoP as a social learning system.

The concept of a CoP as a social learning system

The concept of a CoP was initiated by Lave and Wenger (1991) as an intuitive concept in attempts to ‘develop accounts of the social nature of human learning inspired by anthropology and social theory’ (Wenger, 2010: 198), and was later further developed by Wenger (1998, 2000, 2010), Norton (2001), Norton and Toohey (2011), Kanno and Norton (2003), and Pavlenko and Norton (2007). As a concept used to develop a social discipline of learning, it arises out of learning and exhibits many of the general characteristics of systems, and thus is viewed as a social learning system (Wenger, 2010: 198). In this system, learning displays itself as the production of both social structures and the identities of the participants (Wenger, 2010), which involves a dual process of meaning-making: engagement and reification – the production of physical and conceptual artifacts. The latter includes the concept of self and other participants (Wenger, 2008, p106) as well as the technical concept. The two aspects of the process represent ‘two intertwined but distinct lines of memory’ (Wenger, 2010: 180). In practice, engagement happens among individuals and reification is a resource shared by the participants. Therefore, practice combines the individual and collective aspects. Over time, the interplay between the two aspects creates a social history of learning – ‘an informal and dynamic social structure among the participants’, where they define a regime of competence, which, according to Wenger (2010: 180), is ‘a set of criteria and expectations by which they recognize membership’. Such a history of learning is what a CoP is – an ecological learning-through-negotiation process in agreement with Van Lier’s (2000, 2004) ecological learning conception, in which all participants present themselves as learning subjects with agency who produce their practice through the active and dynamic negotiation of meaning among them. In Wenger’s (1998, 2010) terms, everyone is accountable to the practice, taking horizontal responsibility in the meaning-negotiation process, in which whoever succeeds in claiming competence becomes powerful and dominant in practice at that moment. This is a process where the participants get their personal experiences realigned with socially defined competence, with each moment of learning being ‘a claim to competence’ (Wenger, 2010: 180), which may be a success or failure, depending on whether it is embraced by the community or not.

Such a learning theory emphasizes the learner as a social participant – as a meaning-making entity, as a whole person involving every aspect possible, not just the brain. Learning from such a perspective is ‘not just acquiring skills and information; it is becoming a certain person – a knower in a context where what it means to know is negotiated with respect to the regime of competence of a community’ (Wenger, 2010: 180). This competence of meaning negotiation involves not only technical but also social dimensions, and produces not only explicit but also implicit knowledge, each forming an integral part of the participants’ cognitive development.

The nature of CoP learning in Wenger’s sense indicates that the locus of concern for learning is in what Vygotsky (1978) termed the ‘interpersonal process’ of interaction in a social practice, including the core and boundary interaction of a CoP – hence the feasibility of using this perspective to investigate the discourse actions of the participants in the process of the peer feedback activity that is observed in this article, which aims to address the following two questions: How did the student writer experience changing participation through negotiation of her identity? How did the peer feedback activity as a social learning system work and what did the writer gain (or not) from it?

Data collection

The data comes from a peer feedback activity of one of eight undergraduate classroom groups at an average college in China, each consisting of four freshmen aged 19 to 20 who share a dormitory as a learning group, formed at the beginning of the first semester to conduct various cooperative learning tasks. This peer feedback activity, as a normal step of their writing task in the reading and writing class, was required by their instructor as a writing process to enable students to learn from each other and improve their drafts. In order to understand the interactive quality of these groups’ cooperative learning, the instructor chose three groups to observe: in the first group, the draft under revision was from an underachieving student; in the second, from a top student; and, in the third, from an average student. The decision to use these three students was based on their previous examination results. This study is based on the observation of the second group, consisting of four 19-year-old girls who shared the same dormitory. The pseudonyms used are Wang, Fang, Lu and Chen.

In the task observed, the students were required to create a story about English people’s names based on the text they had read in their textbook. After the students had composed their first draft, they were required to undergo feedback from their group members and then write a second draft, which was then submitted to their instructor for comment. Their peer feedback processes were required to be recorded and submitted to their instructor together with their drafts. The peer feedback activity was conducted and observed in the girls’ dormitory. It was carried out in a friendly manner, for the four girls had a good relationship. They even felt rather excited when audio-recording their activity on their mobile phones, with the instructor present, observing and taking notes.

After the group had submitted their data (the audio recording and the first and second drafts), the teacher, assisted by the four students, transcribed the audio recording based on the procedures outlined in Gánem Gutiérrez (2008) to produce the protocols for data analysis. The data in this study included the group’s discourse of interaction, Wang’s two drafts, and the instructor’s on-the-spot observation notes, which were collected by a qualitative research method for language socialization (Watson-Gegeo, 2004).

Data analysis

The data analysis was mainly conducted by listening to the audio recording, studying the transcription, comparing the two drafts, and recalling the observation via notes. The purpose is to investigate how the students produced the revision and reconstruction, and how they claimed their competence. The observation focus is the writer and top student, Wang – how she participated in the group practice and whether she benefited from the peer activity. The specific procedures were as follows: first, a preliminary discourse analysis was conducted on the transcription by dividing the interaction into 41 episodes based on the theme discussed and the problem solved. Each episode dealt with one problem of revision as a subactivity of the whole peer feedback activity. However, if one subactivity was embedded in another, the two subactivities were combined. Second, using a microgenetic approach, a close discourse analysis was conducted episode by episode in order to find out how Wang identified with the practice and claimed her competences; on the basis of this, different ways were listed and categorized. Third, each episode was read closely once more. At the same time, a comparison was made between Wang’s two drafts (the first and the second) to see how well she adopted the collective revision proposals in the writing of her second draft. The proposals that were not adopted were noted and then their corresponding discourse interactions were further studied and interpreted for possible instructional implications.

Identities constructed in practice

As mentioned above, the main focus in this article is on Wang, a top student and the writer of the draft, in order to observe how she negotiated her identity or claimed her competence. The discourse analysis found 11 ways in which she successfully negotiated her identity as a competent participant playing a dominant role in the problem-solving process of the shared local practices of the activity.

Identifying the problem and presenting the solution all by herself

Excerpt 1

3a 王：哦, 这里嘛少了个r。

[Wang: Oh, here the letter r is missing.]

In this excerpt, Wang identified a problem with the spelling of the word ‘embarrassing’, and corrected it all by herself. It was agreed on by the others, which indicated her successful claim of a word-spelling competence.

Initiating the ‘problem’ for discussion and seeking consensus in the negotiation process

Excerpt 2

3b 王：哎, embarrassing 可不可以的？

[Wang: How about the word ‘embarrassing’? Is it appropriate?]

4 (合）(表示）另人尴尬的？

[(echoing) Does it mean ‘令人尴尬的’?)

5 王：应该可以的, 哦？

[Wang: It is supposed to be appropriate, is it?]

6 (合）嗯。

[(echoing) Eh, yes.)

Here, Wang initiated a question of word choice, constructing herself as a novice learner (3b), which led the other three members of the group to the meaning negotiation of the word ‘embarrassing’ (4). Their simultaneous response assured Wang of the appropriateness of it, which elicited her assumption with increased confidence, seeking consensus from the others (5). And she made it (6), which led to her successful claim of the competence of a word application, realizing her identity shift from the novice to the master in the process of this collaborative social interaction, where the relationship between them appeared to be mutual and approximately equal as a knower of how to apply a word properly in this supportive context.

Assuming the management of the activity order

Excerpt 3

7a 王：第一段先来。

[Wang: Let’s start from the first paragraph.]

In the above discourse, Wang presented her suggestion of the sequence in which they might carry out their activity. It was observed to be adopted for the whole activity, showing Wang’s success of the claim of her management competence through the above discourse action.

Negotiating the rules of the activity or maintaining them

Excerpt 4

8 卢：为什么, 为什么？你说是美国人这样想, 中国人也有这样想的嘛。

[Lu: Why (in the first sentence) did you write ‘As Americans think…’? You know we Chinese people may also think so.]

9 王：因为, 那个, 书上是这么写的。

[Wang: Because it is written in the textbook. I just borrowed from it.]

10 方：改嘛改。我的意思是你是扩写的咯

[Fang: But you are supposed to adapt it. I mean. you are supposed to enrich its content.]

11 王：对啊, 扩写啦。书上的就不要去搞它了。

[Wang: Yes. I’ll enrich its content. But do not change the sentence I borrowed from the text.]

In the above interaction, Lu challenged the content of the first sentence in the first paragraph: ‘As Americans think’ (8). Wang, to justify this, replied that this sentence was cited from the textbook (9). This justification provoked a further challenge from Fang, who reminded Wang that her writing was supposed to be an adaptation of the text, which meant that she should revise original sentences such as this from the text (10). But Wang presented her own interpretation of the concept of adaptation: they should create a new story, leaving the cited sentence from the text unrevised (11). And this rule of revision and reconstruction of the draft was agreed on. In other words, Wang succeeded in negotiating a revision rule for the activity, thus succeeding in claiming the interpretation competence of a concept in this local practice, shifting the discourse structure from a dominant–dominant relationship between her and the other two members of the group to a master–novice relationship between them when she finally established the dominance of her discourse and, thus, her dominant role or identity in this local activity.

Offering a revision proposal in the discussion in response to doubt

Excerpt 5

17 陈：为什么这里现在式, 这里过去式？

[Chen: Why do you use the present tense here (in the first paragraph) and the past tense (in the second paragraph)?]

18 卢：I believe so.

[Lu: I believe so.]

19 王：I believed – so before.

[Wang: I believed – so before.]

20 卢：我觉得I believed so应该是比较通的。believe应该用过去时的。

[Lu: I think ‘I believed so’ is grammatically correct. The word ‘believe’ should be in the past tense.]

In this interaction, Chen identified the disagreement of the tense of the verb ‘believe’ in the first sentence of the first paragraph with the tense of the verb in the next paragraph (17), which drew the others’ attention to the problem. While Lu was thinking through the problem (18), Wang corrected the mistake by expressing the corrected version (19), which was followed by Lu’s confirmation (20), thus displaying her grammatical competence of applying the tense of a verb correctly and showing an apparently mutual and equal social structure between the three interactants as knowers of how to use a verb tense correctly.

Successfully denying a revision proposal with justification

Excerpt 6

28 王：(d). I believed. 我以前…

[Wang: (d). I believed. It means in the past…]

29 方：或者before不要？

[Fang: Maybe the word ‘before’ should be omitted.]

30 王：不是, 不是。Before, 呐, 我以前是这么认为的, 但是现在就不这么认为了。

[Wang: No. Not at all. The word ‘before’ is used because it means a contrast: I thought so in the past, but not now.]

In this interaction, Wang offered a revision proposal of the tense of a verb in a sentence (28). Her proposal was agreed on and the revision was furthered by Fang – deleting the word ‘before’ from the sentence (29) – which was denied by Wang with justification – keeping the word ‘before’ in the clause in order to show contrast to the word ‘now’ in the following clause of the same sentence (30). Again, this justification was agreed on by the others. The two cases of agreement by the others, respectively, displayed Wang’s competence of applying the tense of a verb correctly and of using a cohesive device properly, producing an unequal social structure between Wang and Fang through the construction of a master–novice relationship between them.

Perfecting a revision proposal and seeking consensus

Excerpt 7

70 方：And then I was…

[Fang: And then I was…]

71 王：marriage 是？marry吧。

[Wang: Is marriage – ? Maybe we should use ‘marry’.]

72 陈：Marry.

[Chen: Marry.]

73 方: Marry.

[Fang: Marry.]

74 卢：Marry. 为什么要用marry呀？

[Lu: Marry. Why should we use ‘marry’?]

75 王：marry是动词, marriage 是名词,婚礼吧。

[Wang: Because ‘marry’ is a verb while ‘marriage’ is a noun, with the meaning of wedding.]

In this excerpt, Fang meant to transfer to the next problem (70) after they had co-created the sentence ‘It’s high time for me to marriage’. But Wang suddenly realized a mistake in this co-created sentence and presented her revision – changing the word ‘marriage’ to ‘marry’ (71) – in a tentative way, which received affirmation from both Chen and Fang (72–73), demonstrating Wang’s grammatical competence of properly applying word parts and constructing an almost balanced social structure between Wang, Chen and Fang with an almost equal relationship between them as knowers of the difference between the words ‘marry’ and ‘marriage’.

Instructing others with an explanation to help them achieve understanding

In the above excerpt, after Wang’s revision proposal was accepted by Chen and Fang, Lu expressed puzzlement (74), which elicited an explanation from Wang (75), demonstrating once again her competence in distinguishing different word parts, and producing an unbalanced master–novice discourse structure between Wang and Lu.

Warning about others’ revision actions after noticing their mistakes

Excerpt 8

121 方：That was an evening; I took part in a party with happiness.

[Fang: That was an evening; I took part in a party with happiness.]

122 王：我的意思是说, 很激动地去参加一个party, with excitement.

[Wang: It means I took part in a party very excitedly, or with excitement.]

123 卢：直接说I took part in a party excited.

[Lu: Say directly I took part in a party excited.]

124 王：什么呀, 那你也要用excitedly。这样的话, 这句话很普通了。

[Wang: No. Not at all. At least you should use the word ‘excitedly’. But then this sentence becomes too simple.]

125 陈：With excitement。

[Chen: With excitement.]

126 卢：excitement可以, 哦？

[Lu: The word ‘excitement’ is correct, isn’t it?]

127 陈：嗯。

[Chen: Yes, it is.]

128a 王：不要把原文对的话改成错的啊。（笑）

[Wang: Don’t revise the originally right sentence into a wrong one (laughing).]

In this excerpt, Fang began her attention-drawing action by reading out a sentence (121), which elicited an explanation from Wang; when she realized a word-choice mistake, she offered a revision proposal at once (122). This proposal was challenged by Lu (123), which was rejected by Wang with her justification (124). Then, Chen expressed her agreement with Wang (125), leading to Lu’s inquiry to make sure that Wang’s proposal was reasonable (126), which elicited Chen’s confirming response (127). This interactive process witnessed Wang’s successful claiming of her competence of choosing a word correctly and of distinguishing the grammatical meaning of the adjective and the adverb, thus producing a social structure of a master–novice relationship between Wang and Lu, and a master–master relationship between Wang and Chen as knowers of the above-mentioned grammatical meaning. Owing to Lu’s grammatical error in the revision proposal, Wang jokingly warned her not to revise the linguistically right into the linguistically wrong (128a), which avoided her facing off against Lu and established Wang’s superiority over Lu. It indicates Wang’s social and interpersonal communicative competence in maintaining the activity going on.

Managing to resolve a dispute skilfully in the negotiation process

Excerpt 9

268 卢：我感觉这个realized that the impressive man 感觉后面也不要 I saw, 干吗来个 I saw？肯定是看到的嘛, 就是这个让我印象很深刻的, 就是那个, 就可以了嘛。I saw就不要了嘛。

[Lu: I think the two words ‘I saw’ following the structure ‘realized that the impressive man’ are not necessary and should be deleted.]

269 王：The impressive man I saw… 用I saw可以强调一下嘛。

[Wang: The impressive man I saw… ‘I saw’ is used to emphasize.]

270 卢：不用了。

[Lu: It’s not necessary.]

271 王：那你们说要不要？

[Wang: Keep it or delete it? It’s up to you.]

272 卢：不要。

[Lu: Delete it.]

273 方：无所谓。

[Fang: Either is OK.]

274 陈：我也觉得无所谓。

[Chen: I feel either is OK, too.]

275 王：无所谓？那就先这样好了。

[Wang: Either is OK？Then let’s keep it.]

In this excerpt, it was discussed whether to delete the attributive clause ‘I saw’ in a sentence. Lu identified it as a problem and advised deleting it (268), but Wang disagreed and gave her reason (269). Lu insisted (270), producing a social structure of a dominant–dominant relationship between the two. Then, Wang turned to the other members of the group (271). While Lu was still insisting on her own idea (272), Fang and Chen declared that it did not make any difference (273–274). Wang then advised that she should keep the attributive clause in the sentence (275) and it was agreed on, thus turning the social structure from the previous dominant–dominant relationship between Wang and Lu into a finally collaborative relationship. Here, Wang managed to resolve the dispute by resorting to democratic means, based on the opinion of the majority, showing her competence of political organization of the activity.

Commenting negatively on the group’s revision proposal, leading to her idea being accepted following the negotiation

Excerpt 10

33 陈：什么又？

[Chen: What?]

34 王：I believed so before.

[Wang: I believed so before.]

35 陈：怎么读起来挺别扭的。

[Chen: It reads incorrectly in my language sense.]

36 方：干脆说I believed so, but now 我不认为…,该搞几句就搞上去好了

[Fang: Just revise it into ‘I believed so, but now I don’t think…’. Just add a few more sentences to write more details.]

37 卢：I believe so

[Lu: I believe so.]

38 陈：她一直这样的呐

[Chen: She kept thinking so.]

39 方：那也不一定的。呐, 呐, 呐, 可以加过去时, 最简单的改法。

[Fang: That’s not necessarily the case. The simplest way is to revise the word ‘believe’ into its past tense.]

40 王：对啊。

[Wang: Yes, I agree with you.]

41 方：那好。Next.

[Fang: Good. Next.]

42 王：就是这里直接省略掉了啦, 如果都加的话, 会不会很累赘啊？对啊, 反正都已经这么多了, 差不多语法改一下嘛就好了啦。越写越错误。

[Wang: That’s why I omit the details by using the ellipsis here, otherwise it will be lengthy. The composition is long enough, so let’s just focus on the revision of the grammatical mistakes, for the more content we write, the more mistakes there will be.]

In this excerpt, Chen was concerned about the ellipsis in the main clause of the first sentence of the first paragraph (33), which led Wang to examine it and provide a revised version of the sentence (34). However, Chen turned to her sense of language and thought that the revised sentence was still incorrect (35), which elicited Fang’s content-revision proposal: write a few sentences to replace the ellipsis (36). Her proposal drew Lu’s attention and she read out the original problematic part (37). Then, Chen tried to interpret what this problematic sentence conveyed (38). This interpretation was rejected by Fang, who expressed her support of Wang’s revision proposal with her remark that it was a minimal revision (39); this was echoed by Wang (40). The disagreement was settled by Fang’s suggestion of proceeding to the next problem (41) and Wang’s justification (42). In the process of this justification, Wang presented a revision rule – focus on the grammar rather than the content (42) – and her justification for this rule in the form of a comment on their reconstruction of the ellipsis (42). Her proposal was agreed on by the others, realizing her claim of organizational competence (as she did in Excerpt 4) and also the claim of her competence of correctly deploying the local group’s resources as a knower of such resources.

Here, we witness Wang expressing her resistance to go in for a more intense revision of the content of her draft. In other words, she resisted identifying with the more radical revision activity of the local practice so as to make the English-language expression of her draft more accurate because she believed that the more content they wrote, the more mistakes there would be (42). This negative comment on their revision actions encountered no challenge from the other participants, and thus successfully negotiated their identity as novices in a more broadly imagined English community (e.g. an imagined community of native English speakers) – foreign language learners who would only write more ungrammatical sentences if the content of the draft were further revised. This comment displayed Wang’s competence of evaluating the group’s resources, which resulted in her denial of the content-revision proposal and embracing of a grammar-only revision in this local practice; it was evidence of her modulation of her degree of participation (Wenger, 2010: 181) in accordance with her judged need. Wang’s successful claim of the two competences created a dynamic social structure that was embodied in her varied relationships with the other group members – a change from a dominant–dominant to a master–novice relationship between herself and Chen, and from a dominant–dominant to a collaboration relationship between herself and Fang.

Through the above ways of negotiating identity, Wang successfully claimed her competences, playing the dominant role in the problem-solving process and therefore reifying herself as a master in practice. However, there was also a case where she claimed incompetence:

Excerpt 11

280 方：I had nothing to say to myself.

[Fang: I had nothing to say to myself.]

281 王：我对自己没有想法。

[Wang: It means I was at a loss.]

282 方：这句话好, 这句话好。

[Fang: Good sentence!]

283 卢：I’ve no idea – with myself.

[Lu: I’ve no idea – with myself.]

284 王：啊? I have no idea with myself?.这样会不会更好？

[Wang: Really? I have no idea with myself. Is that better?]

285 卢： 嗯。

[Lu: Yes.]

286 方：人家外国人看不看得懂？

[Fang: Can foreigners understand this sentence?]

287 王：我自己没感觉, 这句话。

[Wang: I’m not sure about this sentence.]

288 卢： 中国人啊。（笑）

[Lu: What an odd English sentence we Chinese students may write (laughing)!]

289 方：一看就是中国人写的。（笑）

[Fang: It’s obvious that the sentence was created by a Chinese student (laughing).]

This excerpt began with Fang reading a sentence (280), which drew Wang’s attention to the sentence and led her to explain the meaning she wanted to express in this sentence (281). While Fang was commenting positively on the sentence (282), Lu regarded it as problematic, so tentatively put forward her revision (283). Wang was not sure whether this revision was appropriate, so she tried to seek the opinion of the others (284). Then, Lu gave an affirmative reply, while Fang reminded them to pay attention to their foreign readership (286). Wang confessed her incompetence in this translation from Chinese into English (287), and Lu admitted the possible ungrammaticality of the sentence being discussed in a joking way (288), which was echoed by Fang, who pointed out the Chinglish characteristic of this sentence in the draft (289), producing an unbalanced structure of a novice–master relationship between Wang and the other two interactants (Lu and Fang).

In this negotiation process, we see that they imagined themselves not only as members of the local EFL (English as a foreign language) learning community, but also as members of a broader English community – the imagined international English community; they were trying to write a grammatically correct sentence so that foreigners could also understand it. By doing so, they were honouring the history of this broader English community; it was a way of making themselves ‘belong to’ or ‘identify with’ it through imagination (Wenger, 2000, 2010) and evidence of ‘globalness’ (Wenger, 1998: 22) embodied in a local practice via an ‘imagined community’ (Norton, 2001; Norton and Toohey, 2011).

Democracy in resolving the disputes

Whenever there were any disputes, they adopted a democratic approach in resolving them, following the majority of the participants’ opinion (as in Excerpt 9) and thereby enabling each participant to exert her agency as a learning subject who is responsible for the resolution of any contradiction that emerged in the process of the activity. In Wenger’s (2010: 186) terms, each of them takes a ‘horizontal responsibility’ for the problem in question. However, there appeared to be one exception in their negotiation process that was an undemocratic way to resolve a dispute:

Excerpt 12

181 卢：这里, 这里。

[Lu: Look here!]

182 王：哪个？

[Wang: Which sentence?]

183 卢：那个I noticed an impressive man, 然后就说I felt he also noticed me, and we 这个不是有两个动词了嘛, 两个了嘛?

[Lu: ‘I noticed an impressive man’, which is followed by ‘I felt he also noticed me, and we…’. There are two verbs in this sentence, two verbs, aren’t there?]

184 王：哪个？

[Wang: Which sentence?]

185 卢：I noticed an impressive man, I felt he also noticed me…两个动词了, 哦？

[Lu: I noticed an impressive man, I felt he also noticed me … Here, two verbs in a sentence, aren’t there?]

186 王：noticed 这里, 一样的, 是不是？

[Wang: You mean the verb ‘noticed’ is used twice in this sentence?]

187 卢：一句话两个动词不行的。

[Lu: We cannot use two verbs (as predicates) in a sentence.]

188 方：好啊, 可以的呀。

[Fang: Yes, we can.]

189 卢：可以？有问题啊！

[Lu: Can we? There is problem here!]

190 王和卢：Hahaha (笑)。

[Wang and Lu: Hahaha (laughing).]

191 卢：这样总不行的啊！

[Lu: Such a sentence, we should not write!]

192 王：好, 我读一下, I noticed an impressive man, I felt he also noticed me。

[Wang: Then let me read it: I noticed an impressive man, I felt he also noticed me.]

193 卢：这样太中国式了吧, 一句话不能两个动词的。这里加个and I…

[Lu: This is Chinglish. We cannot use two verbs (as predicates) in a sentence. Here, add the word ‘and’ and we get ‘and I…’.]

194 王：好了, 好了, 不要争论了。不是, 不是, 我跟你讲, and后面, 你不觉得这里 and, 这个也是and?

[Wang: Stop arguing. I do not agree with you. Let me explain to you. Do you see there is a word ‘and’ here? So, we should not add another ‘and’ to the same sentence.]

195 卢：不是, 这里and, 然后这个 and 不要, 另起一句话嘛。

[Lu: No. Here the word ‘and’ is added, then delete another ‘and’ and create another sentence.]

196 方：不要再争了。Next!

[Fang: Stop arguing. Next!]

197 卢：哎哟, 真的是不对了。

[Lu: Oh! This is really a (grammatical) mistake!]

198 王：好吧, 这里改错。（笑）多数服从少数。

[Wang: All right. Correct the mistake here (laughing). The majority are obeying the minority.]

In this excerpt, Lu identified a problem, which drew Wang’s attention. Lu pointed out the problem in a more detailed way, but Wang seemed still not to understand, so Lu repeated the specific problem. However, Wang misunderstood her (186) because she failed to express herself in a clear way (185). When Lu repeated the problem for a third time (187), Fang expressed her disagreement (188), but Lu insisted (189, 190), which led Wang to pay attention to the problem (191). Lu then made a negative comment on the problematic sentence before she provided a revision to it (193). This revision was challenged by Wang (194), eliciting Lu’s clear and specific explication of her revision suggestion (195), which unfortunately encountered Fang’s denial (196). So, Lu once again insisted (196), which obliged Wang to accept the revision, albeit while uttering a delicate comment (198). So, what did this comment mean?

From Wang’s second draft, it was found that Wang did not really accept Lu’s proposal. It indicated that Wang’s delicate comment – ‘The majority are obeying the minority’ – served as a hint to Lu that her proposal was wrong, and the real meaning of the comment was to express denial of this revision proposal in a vague and indirect way. The purpose of this vagueness and indirectness was to not embarrass Lu – an indication of Wang’s communicative competence. Understanding the meaning of this vague language depended on not only the ongoing communicative discourse actions, but also the reification of their practice – the final draft as the artefact of the group activity. It indicated that Wang’s apparent compromise still served as an insistence on a democratic way of resolving the contradiction among them. In other words, Wang insisted on her own opinion partly because it was echoed by Fang, but refused Lu’s proposal by pretending to accept it in order to resolve the dispute in a harmonious way – a common practice of resolving disagreements in Chinese culture.

Discussion

From the above examples, we see that Wang and the other learners identified with the practices of the peer feedback activity in three modes – engagement, imagination and alignment – in agreement with Wenger’s (2000: 227) three modes of belonging to a social learning system.

‘Engagement’ means that the students of the group engaged with each other in the local practice of the revision activity: presenting and paying attention to the problem, offering a revision proposal, discussing the feasibility of the proposal, and recording it as an artefact of their practice, as is seen in the practices of the whole activity, producing varied social structures.

With ‘imagination’, the students tacitly constructed their images as novice learners in their imagined English-learning community and thought of themselves as members of this larger imagined community – the international English community – though they had little chance to engage with foreigners (as shown in Excerpts 11 and 10, respectively). By regarding themselves not only as members of this local learning group of their English-classroom CoP, but also as members of their imagined broader CoP, Wang successfully rejected a content revision proposal from the other members (42) and Fang managed to remind the group members to pay attention to their foreign readership (286). Both of their discourse actions aimed to make the revised draft more grammatical or idiomatic. In other words, both of them were trying to make their revision practice conform to the practice of their imagined English community. In addition, ‘imagination’ is also reflected in the students’ tacit conception of themselves as competent learners in other imagined communities: their previous (e.g. middle or primary school) English-classroom CoPs, where they learned English grammar from their teachers. It is the identity and grammatical knowledge that they learned from their former teachers that contributed to their consensus in the ongoing revision practices displayed in the whole activity. In all the above-mentioned cases, the students were trying to honour the history of English-learning CoPs; it was a way of making themselves ‘belong to’ or ‘identify with’ these CoPs through imagination (Wenger, 2000, 2010).

Finally, ‘alignment’ means that the students mutually coordinated their perspectives, interpretations and actions through collaborative meaning negotiation. It also means that they borrowed their English-language expressions from a textbook and negotiated a language-related issue under the guidance of their previous classroom experience so that they could ‘be effective beyond their own engagement’ (Wenger, 2000: 228). In this way, they made their local practice global, whereby we see the answers to the two research questions.

How did the student writer experience changing participation through negotiation of her identity?

The above instances witness that Wang acted in most cases as a master. This identity is in reference to the other group participants based on the competence she claimed successfully in the collective problem-solving process (as Excerpts 1 to 10 illustrate). But when she failed to claim the competence (as in Excerpt 11), she engaged in the practice as a novice. In this sense, Wang’s participation changed with context.

In Excerpt 10, Wang was witnessed to have rejected her partner’s proposal of content revision. In other words, she appeared to be unwilling to identify with a potential practice and offered the excuse that the more they wrote, the more mistakes they would make. Through constructing themselves as novice learners in an imagined broader English community, she successfully refused the others’ proposal of a content-creation practice. This is not interpreted as Wang’s lack of motivation because, as a top student, she liked English and, as the writer of the draft, she hoped that it could be improved through the peer activity. Rather, Norton and Toohey’s (2011) sociological concept of ‘investment’ is drawn on here to interpret this: she did not invest in this content-revision practice because she evaluated the group’s resources as inadequate, and she thought that this would affect the quality of her writing. This is a sign that she was modulating her identification in practice according to her judgment or belief – another dimension of her changing participation.

How did the peer feedback activity as a social learning system work and what did the writer gain (or not) from it?

The above excerpts also indicate that Wang’s identities were co-constructed with the other members of the group in a form of social structure produced in the negotiation process via their discourse actions in the local practice of the group – a part of the classroom CoP as a social learning system. In this sense, her participation or learning can be said to be relational. Various meanings were circulating in this social learning system, including not just vocabulary and grammatical meanings, but also interpersonal, organizational and participatory meanings, just as what circulates in an economic system is monetary. Corresponding to these meanings, the competences claimed in this system include not only the English language, but also social interaction. And these competences claimed in their lived experience of meaning negotiation constitute the regime of competence of this local EFL learning community. This is an ecological environment where whoever emerged as competent in the negotiation of any of the above-mentioned meanings became a master and powerful leader in that moment, as Wang did mostly in this peer feedback activity, enabling the others to learn from her, and reification. This reification entails English language forms, knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, and consciousness of what is good writing, how to revise a draft, and how to resolve a dispute and manage interpersonal relationships to enable the activity run smoothly. This ecological environment served as a platform on which the group members experienced a shift from a state of ignorance or misunderstanding to one of knowledge or understanding – that is, an ‘alignment’ (Wenger, 2000: 228; 2010: 183).

In the above knowing process, the practice involves not only explicit but also implicit knowledge. According to Wenger (2008: 105–106), reification also entails the formation of participants’ identities in practice, which they have learned tacitly. These identities have worked as a part of the dynamic context of their meaning negotiation. For instance, in Excerpt 2, when Wang asked the other learners whether the word choice ‘embarrassing’ was appropriate (3b), she was constructing herself as a novice. But when the others repeated the meaning of the word in Chinese to check the real meaning she intended to convey through this sentence (4), she interacted in a confirmatory way (5), experiencing an identity switch. This switch resulted from her inference that the word ‘embarrassing’ corresponded to 令人尴尬的 in Chinese from the other three members’ echoing discourse action, which resulted in her tacit conclusion that this word choice was correct in the sentence.

On the other hand, reification of other participants’ identity may be false if misunderstanding occurs in practice. Excerpt 12 witnesses Wang and Fang misinterpreting Lu’s vague words (183–188); consequently, they took her revision proposal lightly and reified her identity as a novice English learner. This reification of her identity then constituted part of the social context, influencing their follow-up interaction (189–198), as can be seen from their devaluing discourse actions (184, 196), causing Wang to deny Lu’s actually reasonable proposal with a seemingly acceptance and delicate comment (198) as a social strategy.

The use of the above social strategies was seen elicited by Lu’s insistence, indicating Wang's tacit calculation that in order not to threaten Lu's face a social strategy was necessary to unfold the practice smoothly. In a social learning process, this tacit knowledge is an integral part of a learner’s cognitive development and a constitutive part of ‘knowledgeability’ (Wenger, 2010: 181) or a knowledge system in practice. Because of access to or experience of this implicit knowledge, as well as explicit knowledge, the learner’s participation is whole-person participation, enabling them to become a different person. In this sense, Wang has realized this becoming: she not only became a knower, through engagement and alignment, of the mistakes she and the other learners might make, and the possible ways to correct them in their English writing, but also became a knower of tacit knowledge. This tacit knowledge contributed to the success of her identity construction or the smooth unfolding of the revision activity, which, according to Wenger (2008: 107), is of great importance to CoP learning aimed at whole-person development.

Implications

In the process of the whole activity, good reciprocity and collaboration were displayed in the negotiation process, which made it possible for the students to take horizontal responsibility in their engagement with each other in the practice. This reciprocity and collaboration created access to their potential transformation as learners, from a person of ignorance to a knower of the shared repertoire of the practice. In this reciprocal and collaborative process, their discourse actions appeared to honour the history of the practice of English-learning communities through three modes of identification, as mentioned above.

However, there also occurred some disputes among the participants, which were resolved in a democratic way by acting in accordance with most of the participants’ ideas. While the creation of this atmosphere of democracy is witnessed to have mostly made the local practice honour the histories of English-learning communities (i.e. the students negotiated more grammatically correct sentences in the English draft), it is also witnessed to have actually brought some destruction to the conventional practice of these communities (i.e. produced grammatically incorrect sentences when revising the draft). For example, in Excerpt 12, Wang had indeed made a grammatical mistake in the composition of the sentence under discussion, and Lu’s revision proposal was grammatically logical; therefore, it could have made the writing better if Lu’s proposal had been accepted. In other words, in this local practice, the minority Lu’s discourse action was more in agreement with the core practice of English CoPs, but she failed to claim her competence when her proposal encountered rejection from the other group members in the negotiation process of this grammatical problem, making their local practice divert away from the core practice of English CoPs. It indicated that the democratic rule of ‘the minority obeys the majority’ adopted in this local practice made the participants’ negotiated linguistic form incorrect in comparison with that of authentic English-language communities. In other words, democracy made their terms stray away from the convention of English-language communities. In this sense, it may be concluded that democracy in this foreign-language-learning CoP had its limitations.

In order to avoid such a situation, intervention from a more competent participant (e.g. an instructor) is necessary to create a master–novice relationship to transform the dominant–dominant social structure that has emerged in the interaction as a resolution of disputes. From this it can be seen that the role of the teacher as a helper is still important if group interaction is to promote a real sense of quality in classroom life. This is in agreement with Kukla’s (2000) view on the instructor’s role in a social constructionist’s classroom practice. This discovery is especially meaningful at a time when many EFL teachers like to use group activities to ask their students to carry out a task or project as a learning activity, when class sizes are becoming increasingly large and teachers feel that their traditional role is being challenged. This study reveals what teachers can do to make their classroom interaction more effective – that is, they may use a group activity as a platform to observe their students’ experience in the practice and locate their needs or problems, and then intervene as a guide to meet their needs so that they can use more idiomatic English to express themselves.

In addition, from the practices of the activity, it can be seen that what Wang (and the others) gained is not only explicit but also implicit knowledge, enabling her to have opportunities to grow as a whole person. This implicit knowledge was seen to be very important in the smooth unfolding of the practices of the activity and constituted an integral part of Wang’s competence in practice. This implicit knowledge, in combination with explicit knowledge, ascended to ‘communal knowledge’ – the working knowledge available as a result of the holistic consideration of the ‘cultural, material and physical, social, historical and personal systems’ (Wu, 2005: 39) embodied in the discursive actions to solve problems or resolve contradictions occurring in the practices of the activity. As far as English-writing instruction is concerned, the implication is that it is not enough only to present students with explicit knowledge such as grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure or text organization, since English is a discipline of the human sciences, the objective of which is to develop students as people with comprehensive competences, not just linguistic knowledge or writing skills. So, in classroom practice, students should be placed in more task- or project-based learning environments so that they have learning opportunities to access implicit as well as explicit knowledge in their practices.

Conclusion

In this study, a peer feedback activity was investigated from the perspective of a CoP as a social learning system. In this system, learning was witnessed to be the production of a social structure from a collective aspect and identity negotiation from an individual aspect. Through engagement, imagination and alignment, the four students made themselves identify with different CoPs – that is, through engagement, they identified themselves with the practice of the group revision activity of a local-classroom CoP and, through imagination, an imagined international English CoP in a broader sense, or imagined previous English-classroom CoPs. In the former case, they aligned their perspectives, interpretations and actions through face-to-face interaction; in the latter, they attempted to align with the imagined international English readers or their imagined previous classmates by reconstructing more grammatically correct sentences in the revision practice, thus making their local practice embody global thinking.

The collective problem-solving process in the local group practice displayed the identity co-construction process of the participants, where Wang, the writer of the draft, negotiated her various identities in the dynamic social process mostly as a master, dominant in the participants’ discourse interactions of the local practice through her 11 ways of successfully claiming her competences in the revision activity. These competences constituted the regime of the local CoP competence, enabling the other students to learn from Wang or Wang to ‘pull other participants’ learning experience along’ (Wenger, 2010: 181). On the other hand, when she failed to claim her competence and was co-constructed as a novice learner, she learned from others, and her learning experience was ‘pulled along’ by the others’ competence. However, this was witnessed not to be the main benefit Wang reaped, which mostly lies in acquiring implicit knowledge as an integral part of her development as a person in her lived experience of the practice, as well as access to knowing and understanding what mistakes students might make in their English writing, and an opportunity to explore how these mistakes could be corrected. This exploration means that she modulated her identification according to the context, from non-participation to full participation in the practice. Further studies should be conducted to see whether the result of this case study has more commonality in different contexts. Moreover, more studies should be carried out on what the learning agenda or route will be if the focus is on a mediocre student writer.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for Learning as changing participation: Identity investment in the discursive practice of a peer feedback activity

Supplemental Material for Learning as changing participation: Identity investment in the discursive practice of a peer feedback activity by Chunxian Zheng and Gaiying Chai in Power and Education