Seminars as spaces for mediating affordances: plurilingual students’ perceived sociocultural norms and expectations for participation.

Despite increasing interest in plurilingualism, the implementation of plurilingual and pluricultural pedagogies to foster classroom inclusivity remains underexplored. This study focuses on three seminar classes to examine the mediating activities used by instructors to establish context for classroom discussion and interaction. In addition, this article also explores the perceived affordances of sociocultural norms and practices for participation by plurilingual graduate students. Data were gathered through classroom observations and interviews with instructors and plurilingual students speaking English as an additional language. Drawing on mediation (Council of Europe [2020]. <italic>Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment-Companion Volume</italic>. Council of Europe Publishing; Piccardo [2022]. ‘The Mediated Nature of Plurilingualism’. In The <italic>Routledge Handbook of Plurilingual Language Education</italic>, edited by E. Piccardo, A. Germain- Rutherford, and G. Lawrence, 65–81. Routledge) and the Theory of Affordances (Gibson [1986]. <italic>The Ecological Approach to Visual Perceptions</italic>. Erlbaum; Glăveanu [2012]. ‘What Can be Done with an egg? Creativity, Material Objects, and the Theory of Affordances’. <italic>The Journal of Creative Behavior</italic> 46 (3): 192–208), it was found that across all three seminars, instructors demonstrated conceptual mediation to mediate knowledge, concepts, and theories related to each course. At the same time, each instructor focused on particular aspects of mediation, including textual, relational, or intercultural mediation. The plurilingual students in each seminar class perceived sociocultural practices and normative ways of taking turns, presenting information, and using conventional phrases to signal conversational turns. These findings highlight the importance of addressing and mediating normative practices for participation to avoid unintentionally communicating to plurilingual students that they need to adapt and change their plurilingual and pluricultural participation practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]