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In Research Group Meetings (RGM) and other professional activities, sometimes positions are fluid, but stances illustrate international scholars’ bilingual competence in an RGM in Microbiology. In stances, people index sociocultural values by evaluating discursive figures in talk, proffering epistemic/affective assessments, and positioning each other [Jaffe, A. 2009. “Introduction: The Sociolinguistics of Stance.” In Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, edited by A. Jaffe, 3–28. New York, NY: Oxford University Press]. I show how international scholars troubleshoot and problem-solve with senior colleagues as they enact stances to maintain relationships. Competence entails language fluidity and diverse semiotic resources, or translingual practices [Canagarajah, S. 2013. Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London, UK: Routledge], in stances. While existing stance models stress verbal resources [Du Bois, J. W. 2007. “The Stance Triangle.” In Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, edited by R. Englebretson, 139–182. Amstderdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company], they overlook the role of spatial repertoires. This micro-interactional analysis of RGMs demonstrates how diverse semiotic resources inform stances, and argues for stance methodologies and analyses which include multimodal, gestural, and semiotic repertoires. Findings indicate that power relations are managed through scholars’ use of verbal and semiotic resources in interpersonal stances. I argue that bilingual competence should acknowledge the role translingual practices play in stance taking, and the management of professional relationships in such meetings.
CORRECTION:
The Methodology section of this article has been updated with few sentences. Also three Supplementary figures citations has been included within the article text and its corresponding figures are available online.
The updated Methodology section is as follows:
3. Methodology 3.1. Participants & setting The data from this study come from a larger project on professional migrants in STEM at a research one university in the Mid-Atlantic. Pseudonyms below were used to protect the identities of the participants of the study. All identifiable information has been trimmed and deleted to protect the anonymity of the participants (Table 1). This article derives from an ongoing qualitative research in the fields of Microbiology, Engineering, and Entomology in a midwestern US university, where we are focusing on the interactions of international STEM scholars as they engage in research work with a mix of native English speaking and multilingual professionals from diverse countries. The research is motivated by the question: “What role does grammatical competence in English play in the professional communication of international STEM scholars?” Data collection has been proceeding since 2013 with different disciplinary groups. The video recording of research and teaching interactions is complemented by biographical interviews with focal skilled migrants, discourse-based interviews on artifacts, collection of drafts and publications, and ethnographic observations of workplace practices. In the chosen samples for this analysis, a team of researchers in Microbiology do some troubleshooting from their experiments in their lab. I focus on the RGM interactions involving a South Korean postdoctoral researcher, whom I call Jihun. The others in the interaction are: Nick, Anglo American, the Primary Investigator who runs the lab and the research project; Mohan, an Indian Associate Professor in Chemical Engineering; Jie, a Chinese postdoctoral researcher; Amy, an Anglo-American graduate student; and Mark, an Irish graduate student. In the RGMs analyzed below, the participants reviewed figures and images from their experiments projected on a monitor placed centrally in the room to interpret them closely and formulate their arguments. The group is discussing whether their images make visible what they claim as their findings in an article submission. The journal’s reviewers have challenged their claim. The group has to discuss how to represent their findings more clearly and persuasively once they agree that the results are indeed evident. This group typically sits around a monitor, which displays images from the experiment. We find that the monitor, visuals, gestures, and body positioning serve as embodied semiotic resources that are of equal importance to verbal resources.
