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The purpose of this article is to examine local, interactional processes associated with the construction of power asymmetries in collaborative teamwork among engineering students. To explore the construction of power asymmetries at the micro-interactional level, this article examines a corpus consisting of about 150,000 words in which seven teams of engineering students engage in collaborative project design over an academic year. Findings demonstrate dominant-subordinate relationships are co-constructed and reconstructed in the ongoing process of face-to-face interaction. Dominant team members get their ideas ratified repeatedly by displaying technical explanations, assumptions, and opinions. Conversely, subordinate teammates tend to ask technical questions to seek information. Ultimately, dominant teammates are able to manage the direction that the conversation takes during the design process by gaining tacit consent to grab and maintain control over the project's design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the relationship between embodied experience in the world and language competence. Primary data consists of audio and video recorded team meetings among NS and NNS engineering students in an English-speaking American university and ethnographic fieldwork. Based a micro-interactional analysis of the primary data and a consideration of how this analysis is embedded within the macro-social context, findings demonstrate how the L2 user is locally constructed as legitimate and as expert relative to the L1 user in terms of engineering competence and language competence. In the end, these two engineers co-construct a unique way of engaging in engineering teamwork that follows from an acceptance of positionalities that allows opportunities for learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on a longitudinal, ethnographic study among engineering students, examines the interactional processes surrounding second language (L2) socialization. L2 socialization perspectives argue that the cognitive and the social are interconnected, and that learning an L2 is a process of coming to understand socially constructed meaning distinctions. Recent studies examining L2 socialization have demonstrated that L2 instruction, or L2 instruction in combination with participation in particular speech communities, serves to socialize nonnative speakers into the community's speech norms. This study, with its focus on naturalistic L2 socialization, demonstrates that particular interactional processes define expert, socialized participants, and that particular interactional processes work to socialize novice participants in the electrical and computer engineering team meeting. The study ultimately demonstrates that L2 socialization is part of a larger process of socialization in human development, which is dependent on the novice participants’ access to opportunities for interaction with socialized members of the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]