Language Socialization (Anthropology)

Introduction
Language socialization research investigates how the processes of linguistic and cultural development are interlinked, and how these processes vary across cultural contexts. This work aims to illuminate how children and other novices come to master the situated discourse practices of their communities, through longitudinal, ethnographic inquiry featuring detailed analyses of their social interactions with more expert community members in socially and culturally significant activities. Intertwined with such practices are not only linguistic and grammatical forms of language that both reflect and create the social order, but also group- or community-specific ways of engaging in situated and embodied communicative practice, and broader community values, beliefs, and ideologies. Hence, language socialization researchers emphasize how novices are simultaneously socialized “into and through” language and discourse; that is, how they are socialized “into” specific uses of language or other semiotic devices, and “through” language/discourse to become familiar with their community’s ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world. This field of scholarly inquiry initially arose in reaction to the failure of cognitive or structuralist conceptions of language to account for (a) the role that language and discourse play within social and cultural transmission, and (b) the role that sociocultural context plays in children’s language acquisition. Drawing upon and paralleling functionalist approaches to language at the time, Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin’s early research project in two distinct non-Western societies challenged the notion that language development could be understood as a purely mental, automatic, or universal process independent of the social and cultural settings in which it takes place. For example, their essay “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories” (Ochs and Schieffelin 1984, cited under General Overviews) showed that baby talk—a simplified and/or exaggerated style of speaking with young children—is not a universal feature of mother-child interactions, thus showing that this form of linguistic accommodation could not explain language acquisition, as some researchers had thought. Their research showed that the path of children’s language development, the roles that children played in early interactions, and the types of language or discourse to which they were exposed varied widely across cultures. Shirley Brice Heath’s early work also investigated the culturally variable nature of language development in her longitudinal, ethnographic study of families’ linguistic, discursive, and literacy practices in three ethnic- and class-differentiated communities. Since that time, the field of language socialization has expanded in new directions, while also maintaining a firm commitment to investigating the process by which linguistic, discursive, and literacy practices are maintained, contested, and transformed in cultural groupings of many different scales, from families, to educational institutions, to professional communities, to societies and beyond. At the same time, research in this field has followed trends in anthropology more generally to interrogate the very stability, sharedness, provenance, and ontology of culturally based norms and practices.
General Overviews
In the decades following the foundation of the field, a number of comprehensive overviews of language socialization theory and research have been produced. The field’s founders, Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, have focused on several different aspects of language socialization (seeOchs and Schieffelin 1984, Schieffelin and Ochs 1986, Ochs and Schieffelin 1995, and Ochs and Schieffelin 2012). Later, Garrett and Baquedano-López 2002 and Kulick and Schieffelin 2004expanded on significant theoretical and empirical developments in the field through comprehensive reviews of more recent work. Further, Garrett 2008 is an in-depth treatise on research methods for those interested in conducting language socialization research. The most recent overview piece,Ochs and Schieffelin 2012, in particular, outlines important developments to LS theory.
Garrett, Paul B. 2008. Researching language socialization. In Encyclopedia of language and education. Vol. 10, Research methods in language and education. 2d ed. Edited by Kendall A. King and Nancy H. Hornberger, 189–201. New York: Springer.
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A useful resource for researchers, this piece offers a detailed primer on research methods in the language socialization framework.
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Garrett, Paul B., and Patricia Baquedano-López. 2002. Language socialization: Reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annual Review of Anthropology 31:339–361.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085352Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated overview of language socialization research outlines developments and expansions that the field had undergone since its original founding work on young children’s interactions in family and community settings. The authors explicate, in particular, how LS theorizes linguistic/cultural stability and change.
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Kulick, Don, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 2004. Language socialization. In A companion to linguistic anthropology. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, 349–368. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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This recent overview outlines a theory of language socialization as a process of subjective becoming, arguing that language socialization research powerfully illuminates the particular processes by which humans develop into culturally recognizable, socially accountable subjects.
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Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1984. Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories. In Culture theory: Essays on mind, self, and emotion. Edited by Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, 276–320. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This early overview by the founders of the field juxtaposes children’s language development in three vastly different cultural settings, outlining some of the cultural factors that impact language development across cultures, and arguing for a more socioculturally informed picture of language acquisition.
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Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 1995. The impact of language socialization on grammatical development. In The handbook of child language. Edited by Paul Fletcher and Brian MacWhinney, 73–94. Oxford: Blackwell.
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This piece explores how children’s acquisition of grammar in language is impacted by the socioculturally variable processes of language socialization across distinct cultural settings.
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Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 2012. The theory of language socialization. In The handbook of language socialization. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi Schieffelin, 1–21. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Drawing on developments in language socialization since the field’s conception, this recent overview provides an expanded view of the scope, theory, and components (semiotic resources and practices) of language socialization. In particular, it provides renewed theoretical conceptualizations of how and why context and language development are interlinked.
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Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Elinor Ochs. 1986. Language socialization. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:163–191.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.15.100186.001115Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is the most important early overview of the field, outlining language socialization theory and early findings.
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Anthologies
Language socialization research has often been reported in a number of anthologies that bring together the most significant current work in the field. Some anthologies in language socialization include chapters that survey research in particular domains, while other anthologies bring together original research by leading scholars in the field. The works included in Ochs and Schieffelin 1979explored a relatively new, functional linguistic approach to child language acquisition. Schieffelin and Ochs 1986 is the foundational volume in the field of language socialization, presenting work by many scholars that has influenced the trajectory of research in several areas. Duranti, et al. 2012 is the definitive update to that foundational work, with comprehensive review chapters in all areas of the field. Several additional volumes have been published that anthologize more recent trends and developments in the field, more narrowly focused on particular areas. Enfield and Levinson 2006examines how sociality is developed in specific communities, with a focus on pragmatic aspects of language. Duff and Hornberger 2008 is a high-quality collection of chapters reviewing language socialization research as it pertains to educational linguistics. The chapters in Wortham and Rymes 2002 examine the role of language in children’s educational experiences, and the editors offer a theoretical approach to language socialization that emphasizes the multiplicity and emergent qualities of this process. Bayley and Schecter 2003 includes ethnographic research by scholars on multilingual children’s experiences and language development at home and school in a broad range of cultural contexts, though some of this research is not considered language socialization in its most restricted sense.
Bayley, Robert, and Sandra Schecter, eds. 2003. Language socialization in bilingual and multilingual societies. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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This volume brings together a strong collection (16 chapters) of ethnographic studies on children’s language development in bilingual and multilingual situations by top scholars. Many chapters include an anthropological, discourse-analytic perspective, so they can be considered language socialization studies. Other chapters provide important social and cultural perspectives on bilingual children’s upbringing.
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Duff, Patricia, and Nancy Hornberger, eds. 2008. Encyclopedia of language and education. Vol. 8, Language socialization. 2d ed. New York: Springer.
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The chapters in this volume each provide a comprehensive review of research in a particular domain of language socialization, especially those areas related to language use and development in educational settings.
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Duranti, Alessandro, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, eds. 2012. The handbook of language socialization. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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This recent volume offers state-of-the-art surveys of a broad range of topics in language socialization. Each chapter is written by top scholars in the field, and comprehensively reviews both foundational scholarship and current work on the topic. Many of the chapters also present original data and analysis from the authors’ own field sites.
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Enfield, N. J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2006. Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction. Oxford: Berg.
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The works in this volume address the question, How do human beings become social beings? Many of the authors focus specifically on children’s development of their community’s communicative and linguistic means of enacting sociality in everyday interactions. Each chapter is theoretically rich and empirically detailed.
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Ochs, Elinor, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, eds. 1979. Developmental pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
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World-renowned, functionally oriented scholars of child language development explore how babies and young children across a range of cultures develop competence in pragmatic aspects of language use in everyday interactions. Each chapter ties child language development to the context in which it occurs, though not all chapters present language socialization research in particular.
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Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Elinor Ochs, eds. 1986. Language socialization across cultures. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This is the foundational volume of research in the field of language socialization. Each chapter explores how the processes of language development are inextricably tied to the social and cultural contexts in which children are raised. Many of the chapters are classics in the field and are still relevant today.
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Wortham, Stanton, and Betsy Rymes, eds. 2002. Linguistic anthropology of education. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger.
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This collection of scholarship emphasizes the emergent, dynamic, and transformative qualities of linguistic anthropology. Each chapter constitutes a strong contribution to the field.
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Foundational Scholarship
The foundational work in language socialization is both theoretically sophisticated and superb in its empirical grounding. Any scholar interested in this field should, at a minimum, be intimately familiar with all three of the works in this section. These scholars conducted their fieldwork during approximately the same period, and their work was enriched by close interactions and collaboration between the authors, especially between Ochs and Schieffelin. While theories of cultural transmission and change in language socialization research have further developed over more recent years, Ochs 1988 and Schieffelin 1990 laid out the primary analytic and theoretical frameworks for research in language socialization that still strongly inform the field today, especially related to (a) the social organization and cultural variability of childrearing; (b) age-, rank-, and gender-specific language use; (c) the registers of language/discourse that are addressed to children; (d) interactional organization and discourse practices (socializing strategies) used to socialize children into/through language in the family context. Heath 1983 foregrounds both community and classroom contexts, explicitly framing the communicative continuities and discontinuities between these two sites of socialization.
Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with words: Language, life and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Heath explores how language and literacy are understood and practiced differently in distinct cultural communities in the United States, and demonstrates how these cultural practices underlie unequal educational experiences and opportunities for ethnically and socially diverse children in school.
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Ochs, Elinor. 1988. Culture and language development: Language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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In this field-founding monograph, Ochs theorizes the interrelationship between child language development and the cultural norms, practices, and beliefs of the community in which the child is raised. In particular, this book considers how a hierarchical social structure organizes child-rearing practices and informs children’s language development.
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Schieffelin, Bambi B. 1990. The give and take of everyday life: Language socialization of Kaluli children. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Schieffelin’s longitudinal, ethnographic study of children in a collectively oriented society shows how these cultural orientations underlie and inform caregivers’ linguistic and interactional routines with young children, as well as other important communicative practices.
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Socializing Routines and Interactions
One of the most significant contributions of language socialization research to our current understanding of child development has been its focus on the detailed particulars of interactions between children/novices and adults or more expert community members. A rich tradition of work explores the interactional practices and socializing routines used in these situations as children are exposed to and socialized into the practices, values, ideologies, and beliefs of their communities. The works in this section represent some of the most important contributions to research on adult-child and novice-expert interactions. As the foundational work made clear, there is a great deal of variability, across cultural contexts, in the manner in which these interactions are organized, as well as in the types of communicative routines that can be found. Scholars who interrogate the characteristics of socializing interactions utilize discourse analytic techniques to identify particular aspects of interaction and child development that are culturally specific versus those that are universal. Early work on language socialization closely examined the routines, strategies, and interactional practices that adults used to draw children’s attention to communicative expectations (Demuth 1986, Eisenberg 1986, Watson-Gegeo and Gegeo 1986). Field 2001 argues that directives with a triadic participation structure—a culturally specific socializing routine among the Navajo—reflects the maintenance of traditional Navajo discourse patterns, even when a code other than Navajo is being used. Gaskins 2006 provides a useful review of how socializing interactions vary across cultures. Much work in language socialization draws on a sociocultural theory of child development; this is beautifully illustrated in Rogoff 1991, which closely examines child cognitive development as it occurs within meaningful interactions between novices and experts. Brown 1998,de León 1998, and de León 2005 examine how joint attention and embodied participation are achieved with infants and young children in distinct cultures. Much of de León’s larger body of work focuses on this area and should be examined as well by those interested in young children’s embodied participation in interactions with adults. Another aspect of this research examines the roles of specific routines and formulaic language in the process of language socialization (Burdelski 2011,Eisenberg 1986). (See also Narrative.)
Brown, Penelope. 1998. Conversational structure and language acquisition: The role of repetition in Tzeltal adult and child speech. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8.2: 197–221.
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.1998.8.2.197Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece examines the interactional structure of adult-child speech among Tzteltal Mayan people, showing how repetition of words and phrases facilitates the young child’s language development.
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Burdelski, Matthew. 2011. Formulaic language in language socialization. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 32:173–188.
DOI: 10.1017/S0267190512000049Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Burdelski reviews cross-cultural research and examines the role of formulaic language within a child’s language socialization process. He argues that formulaic language is used not only in repetitive ways, but also in novel and transformative ways among young children.
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de León, Lourdes. 1998. The emergent participant: Interactive patterns in the socialization of Tzotzil (Mayan) infants. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 8.2: 131–161.
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.1998.8.2.131Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
De León’s work represents a deep, long-term engagement in a Tzotzil Mayan field site in Mexico, accompanied by finely detailed close analysis of community members’ embodied participation frameworks.
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de León, Lourdes. 2005. La llegada del alma: Lenguaje, infancia y socialización entre los Mayas de Zinacantán. Mexico City: CIESAS-INAH-CONACULTA.
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This ethnographic, discourse-analytic study closely examines how Tzotzil Mayan adults of Zinacantán, Mexico, interact with infants and very young children to socialize them into cultural frameworks of participation in communicative activity in their mother tongue.
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Demuth, Katherine. 1986. Prompting routines in the language socialization of Basotho children. In Language socialization across cultures. Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 51–79. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This chapter describes prompting as a strategy for socializing young children among the Basotho of South Africa, and shows how this is used in one particular cultural context.
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Eisenberg, Ann R. 1986. Teasing: Verbal play in two Mexicano homes. In Language socialization across cultures. Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 182–198. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This study examines the multiparty routine of “teasing” in Mexican immigrant families to the United States, and how this routine reflects and produces cultural norms around “play” and “toughness,” in addition to making salient the community’s norms, values, and morality.
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Field, Margaret. 2001. Triadic directives in Navajo language socialization. Language in Society30.2: 249–263.
DOI: 10.1017/S0047404501002044Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Field discusses how Navajo speakers utilize a three-party participation structure for directives in ways that reflect traditional discourse patterns.
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Gaskins, Suzanne. 2006. Cultural perspectives on infant-caregiver interaction. In Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction. Edited by N. J. Enfield and Stephen C. Levinson, 279–298. Oxford: Berg.
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This essay provides an excellent entryway into research on cross-cultural variation in adult-child interaction, and the role that this interaction plays in human development.
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Rogoff, Barbara. 1991. Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This book presents a sociocultural theory of child development, and shows in detail how children’s thinking is scaffolded by joint, collaborative activity in their zone of proximal development.
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Watson-Gegeo, Katherine A., and David W Gegeo. 1986. Calling out and repeating routines in Kwara’ae children’s language socialization. In Language socialization across cultures. Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 17–50. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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The authors examine how Kwara’ae adults routinely engage children in practices of repetition to socialize them into cultural values and social structures of their community in the Solomon Islands.
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Identity and Social Relationships
This section examines how children develop awareness, understanding, and the communicative practices for displaying social roles, social relationships, and belonging. From understanding how children come to recognize, inhabit, and perform their membership in particular social groupings (ethnicity, race, nationality, class, gender, professions, age/generation, affinity groups, and peer groups), to how children establish and maintain social relationships through their actions and communicative practices, scholarship in this area examines this process of subjective becoming through close attention to precise details of language, embodiment, and other discourse features. The first section below, Politeness, Hierarchy, and Respect, considers how children are socialized into cultural understandings and communicative practices related to distance, intimacy, and social relationships. The second section, Social Identity and Subjectivity, focuses on how children become aware of, produce, and perform their sense of belonging in particular social groupings.
Politeness, Hierarchy, and Respect
The field of language socialization has a strong tradition of research on children’s socialization into their community’s communicative practices for inhabiting particular roles and relationships, such as (im)politeness and (dis)respect. By examining how children use their language resources to establish and maintain particular social relationships, this research shows how they actively establish their place in complex social landscapes by aligning (or not aligning) to roles, statuses, and relationships. The founding works’in the field (see Ochs 1988 and Schieffelin 1990, both cited underFoundational Scholarship), with its central focus on how social organization permeates every aspect of a child’s language development, inspired this line of work. Clancy 1986 examines children’s acquisition of communicative style in Japanese; this piece turned scholars’ gaze toward the ways in which broader styles and registers of language are used to inhabit recognizable, culturally appropriate forms of personhood, and how these styles are socialized through routine and patterned interactions. Since that time, a number of scholars have examined how politeness and respect are communicated in the semiotic repertoires of a community, how children are expected to engage in these practices, and how adults attempt to instill this form of personhood—along with its associated communicative forms—in children. Cook 1996 examines how children are socialized into the socially indexical markers of style in Japanese. Burdelski 2012 focuses on the routine and formulaic nature of this process, while Shohet 2013 illuminates the intergenerational continuity in understandings of filial piety afforded by the acquisition of stylized displays of respect. Howard 2007 examines how politeness and the practices for displaying respect emerge in the particulars of moment-by-moment interaction and intersect with the social stratification of languages within a community. Work examining immigrant and bilingual children’s socialization into these practices at home and school highlights processes of intergenerational change and syncretism, as children create their own hybrid practices across the multiple communities in which they participate (He 2003).
Burdelski, Matthew. 2012. Language socialization and politeness routines. In The handbook of language socialization. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 275–295. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Burdelski provides a comprehensive review of previous scholarship on children’s socialization into the linguistic and communicative practices for engaging in politeness behaviors, with a particular focus on the case of Japanese language socialization. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of Japanese children’s socialization into politeness routines in adult-child interactions.
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Clancy, Patricia M. 1986. The acquisition of communicative style in Japanese. In Language socialization across cultures. Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 213–250. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Clancy describes how Japanese caregivers engage in a range of communicative practices that highlight for children how social roles and relationships create expectations for the style of speech that is considered appropriate.
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Cook, Haruko M. 1996. Japanese language socialization: Indexing the modes of self.Discourse Processes 22.2: 171–197.
DOI: 10.1080/01638539609544971Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Cook’s work examines how children’s language socialization facilitates their acquisition of socially indexical styles of Japanese language.
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He, Agnes Weihyun. 2003. Linguistic anthropology and language education: A comparative look at language socialization. In Linguistic anthropology of education. Edited by Stanton Wortham and Betsy Rymes, 93–121. Westport, CT: Praeger.
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The author explores how Chinese-American students take up or resist multiple cultural models of respect toward a teacher’s authority—those they encounter in American schooling and those they encounter in heritage language schools.
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Howard, Kathryn M. 2007. Kinterm usage and hierarchy in Thai children’s peer groups.Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17.2: 204–230.
DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2007.17.2.204Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece examines how children engage in flexible and complex, bilingual practices for enacting hierarchical social relationships in northern Thailand, in ways that are tied to both the moral orientations of their community and the social concerns of the peer group.
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Platt, Martha 1986. Social norms and lexical acquisition: A study of deictic verbs in Samoan child language. In Language socialization across cultures. Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs, 127–152. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Platt’s study examined how the acquisition of particular verb forms is tied to culturally based norms for hierarchical interaction patterns in Western Samoa.
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Shohet, Merav. 2013. Everyday sacrifice and language socialization in Vietnam: The power of a respect particle. American Anthropologist 115.2: 203–217.
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Shohet’s research shows how children are simultaneously socialized into hierarchical social relationships and a traditional socio-moral order through their socialization into the communicative practices for displaying respect.
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Social Identity and Subjectivity
The way that language and communicative practices are linked to social, cultural, ethnic, racialized, gendered, religious, and other identities constitutes an exceptionally rich area of scholarship in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. Language socialization researchers excavate the processes by which members of a group come to recognize these indexical linkages between language and identity through participation in activities and interactions with other group members. While a concern with identity, status, and role pervade the scholarship in many areas of language socialization, works cited in this section take the process of children’s or novices’ subjective becoming as their central focus. The analysis in Ochs and Taylor 1995 of gendered family roles at the dinner table in American middle-class families was groundbreaking for those interested in how gender roles are discursively constituted in interactions in which children participate. Furthermore, a great deal of scholarship on this topic was influenced by Ochs 1996, which presents a theory of gender indexicality in language and communicative style, and how this impacts human development. Through fine-grained and rich analysis of children’s interactions, Marjorie Goodwin’s work on children’s worlds in play activities has shown how, contrary to those who treat “girl” and “boy” as a priori identity categories, gendered practices emerge as boys and girls negotiate social conflict through patterned social-interactional practices in gendered peer groups. In her more recent book, Goodwin examines the practices of play that constitute inclusion or exclusion within particular girls’ peer groups (see Goodwin 1990 and Goodwin 2006, both cited under Play and Peer Interactions).Rymes 2001 explores adolescent identity performances in narrative discourse at an urban alternative high school, showing how, through these narrative performances, they dynamically navigate the fraught terrain between peer-centric versus school-centric moral orientations. The ethnographic, discourse-analytic work in Shankar 2008 examines how identity and subjectivity are produced within peer groups among immigrant youth who are negotiating conflicting demands and multiple identities, including gender, class, and religious identities. Wortham’s well-received and theoretically innovative volume on the emergence of identification (Wortham 2006) offers an elegant explanation of how particular group members’ identities (or identifications, more precisely) stabilize over time, from small-scale, local time to broader scales of cultural and historical time, and medial time-scales in-between. Mary Bucholtz, a highly influential scholar on issues of language and identity, examines in Bucholtz, et al. 2012 the way in which peers constitute each other’s identities in a lab group over the course of a year in a higher education context. Recent work has illuminated racialized identity and social practice in particular, including Angela Reyes’s artful ethnography of adolescents’ powerful fashioning of identity within creative, collaborative projects in an informal educational setting (Reyes 2006). (See also Kulick and Schieffelin 2004, cited under General Overviews and Kramsch 2010, cited under Second Language Socialization.)
Bucholtz, Mary, Brendan Barnwell, Jung-Eun Janie Lee, and Elena Skapoulli. 2012. Itineraries of identity in undergraduate science. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 43.2: 157–172.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1492.2012.01167.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece reports on a broader research project exploring the process by which American undergraduate students come to inhabit or be ascribed science-related identities through participation in activities and interactions with their peers in undergraduate science education.
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Ochs, Elinor. 1996. Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In Rethinking linguistic relativity. Edited by John Gumperz and Stephen Levinson, 407–438. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Ochs articulates the indexical linkages between identities, activities, acts, and stances in human communication, illustrating these linkages with socializing interactions across a range of cultures in which she has conducted her research.
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Ochs, Elinor, and Carolyn Taylor. 1995. The “father knows best” dynamic in dinnertime narratives. In Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. Edited by Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, 97–120. New York: Routledge.
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This insightful analysis demonstrated the moment-by-moment constitution of gendered family roles through close analysis of family dinnertime conversations in American middle-class homes, showing that a great deal of collusion takes place among all family members to reinforce the father’s role as judge and evaluator of other family members.
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Reyes, Angela. 2006. Language identity and stereotype among Southeast Asian youth: The other Asian. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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Taking a dynamic, relational approach to the question of heritage language and identity among 1.5-generation and second-generation Southeast Asian immigrant youth in an informal educational program in the eastern United States, Reyes examines how adolescents creatively deploy language resources in order to appropriate and transform racial stereotypes.
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Rymes, Betsy. 2001. Conversational borderlands: Language and identity in an alternative urban school. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Rymes’s masterful linguistic anthropological analysis examines how youth at an urban charter school in Los Angeles articulated and transformed their identifications within youth culture through narrative discourse with peers and with teachers.
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Shankar, Shalini. 2008. Desi Land: Teen culture, class, and success in Silicon Valley. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
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This ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of South Asian youths examines how transnational teens come to define what it means to be South Asian American and successful.
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Wortham, Stanton. 2006. Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Wortham offers a state-of-the-art theoretical treatise on the process of “identification,” illuminating how multiple, dynamic, and flexible identities constantly emerge through everyday interactions that articulate with larger-scale discourses, and sometimes stabilize into fixed identities over months and years.
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Situations of Cultural and Linguistic Change
Far from treating children’s language development as a unilinear trajectory toward predetermined cultural goals, structures, and stocks of knowledge, language socialization research highlights processes of linguistic and cultural (re)production, change, and transformation. Changing circumstances, as well as individuals’ highly variable forms of participation in the process of socialization, lead to an enormous amount of variation and complexity in the ways that individuals negotiate and take up or reject the norms, values, and ideologies proffered within socializing discourses and interactions. Language socialization research undertaken in situations of cultural and linguistic change provides a unique window into these dynamic processes, as children’s and novices’ momentary negotiations of their relative status within the social structure and their interpretation of cultural beliefs and values can be examined in detail and tied to processes of change at broader levels of scale. The research in this section constitutes several lines of inquiry into language and social/cultural change.
Language Shift, Endangerment, and Revitalization
More recent research in this field has focused upon communities or situations in which more than one language or language group comes into contact. These languages and groups are never equal in their status or power within a given setting, and speakers of the less powerful language may gradually shift to the higher-status language for an increasingly broad range of communicative purposes. Crago, et al. 1993 examined changing language practices and interactional patterns in Inuit families that resulted from cultural contact. Kulick 1992, a classic work in this domain, explains how language becomes tied to conceptualizations of self, both in children’s exposure to language use and in their exposure to commentary about language use in the discourses of their communities. The community Kulick studied was undergoing a shift from their native Taiap language to Tok Pisin due to changes in how they conceptualized the link between language and modern personhood versus traditional personhood. Building on Kulick’s exemplary analysis, a generation of scholars has aimed to elucidate the local means by which language shift is (inadvertently at times) fostered by community practices and discourses, as opposed to sociological research that generally ties language shift to macrological processes of change (migration, globalization, sociopolitical change, etc.). Children’s interactions are permeated by language use and commentary in which adults and other children specify how languages stand in relation to each other, how languages are used for different purposes, and by whom languages are used, which in turn impacts children’s own process of subjective becoming in and through language (Garrett 2005, Makihara 2005, Nonaka 2004).Paugh 2013 reports on the author’s research in a Caribbean community and beautifully ties broader contexts of socialization to the particulars of children’s interactions, as well as how the local interactions are influenced by widely circulating ideologies of language use. A rich area of investigation in this line of research is to examine how a community’s ideas about how language should be used—language ideologies—underlies changes in language socialization and language use that in turn lead to language shift (Howard 2010, Meek 2007, Riley 2007).
Crago, Martha, Betsy Annahatak, and Lizzie Ningiuruvik. 1993. Changing patterns of language socialization in Inuit homes. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 24.3: 205–223.
DOI: 10.1525/aeq.1993.24.3.05x0968fSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article reports the authors’ collaborative, longitudinal, ethnographic research with Canadian Inuit, Inuktitut-speaking families experiencing conditions of cultural change, showing that this change impacts interactional patterns in the home.
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Garrett, Paul B. 2005. What a language is good for: Language socialization, language shift, and the persistence of code-specific genres. Language in Society 34.3: 327–361.
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Garrett investigates the notion of “genre” in relation to the changing use of different languages within a Saint Lucian community. He shows how, even though children are discouraged from using the “creole” language of St. Lucia, certain discourse forms are still tied to this language, even for children.
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Howard, Kathryn. 2010. Social relationships and language shift in Northern Thailand. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14.3: 313–340.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2010.00445.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Tying together two common strands of language socialization research, this piece shows how flexible and changing conceptions of communicative conduct within Northern Thai, bilingual children’s interpersonal social relationships paints a unique picture of how language shift is tied to notions of identity and subjectivity.
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Kulick, Don. 1992. Language shift and cultural reproduction: Socialization, self, and syncretism in a Papua New Guinean village. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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This monograph ties processes of language socialization to broader historical and cultural processes of change in Papua New Guinea, in which community members’ changing conceptualization of self and modern personhood is tied to the stratification of two codes that have come into contact in their village.
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Makihara, Miki. 2005. Rapa Nui ways of speaking Spanish: Language shift and socialization on Easter Island. Language in Society 34.5: 727–762.
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Makihara offers a detailed analysis of syncretic practice within Rapa Nui families on Easter Island, providing a rich portrait of intergenerational language use and change, in a situation of fairly rapid language shift. The analysis shows not only that are children’s language practices influenced by adults, but also that adults’ language practices shift in response to children’s changing practices.
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Meek, Barbra A. 2007. Respecting the language of elders: Ideological shift and linguistic discontinuity in a northern Athabascan community. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17.1: 23–43.
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This study examines the interlinkage between cultural-ideological change and the way in which mother tongue and English are used by the Kaska people of the Yukon Territory of western Canada.
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Nonaka, Angela. 2004. The forgotten endangered languages: Lessons on the importance of remembering from Thailand’s Ban Khor sign language. Language in Society 33:737–767.
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Nonaka’s study examines infants’ and young children’s language socialization into an endangered, indigenous manual-visual language in northeastern Thailand. This work crosses disciplinary boundaries in that it simultaneously documents and describes this rare, threatened language, and shows how children acquire such languages.
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Paugh, L. Amy. 2013. Playing with languages: Children and change in a Caribbean village. New York: Berghahn.
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A premier exemplar of the power of language socialization research to tie fine-grained details of communicative practice with a sophisticated analysis of broader historical, institutional, and societal processes based on ethnographic research, this book examines the role of language socialization in a broader process of language shift in Dominica.
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Riley, Kathleen C. 2007. To tangle or not to tangle: Shifting language ideologies and the socialization of charabia in the Marquesas, French Polynesia. In Consequences of contact: Language ideologies and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies. Edited by Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 70–95. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195324983.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this report on her expansive language socialization research in French Polynesia, Riley examines the co-articulation between language shift, ideological shift, and syncretic/ hybrid linguistic practices.
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Second Language Socialization
Extending beyond first language development within family settings, language socialization studies extend across the life span to examine what happens when learners, for a range of reasons, acquire a language in addition to the familiar language of their homes. The fact that this very choice is emotionally fraught and sociopolitically structured, with consequences for identity and for a learner’s life chances, necessitates an understanding of how these learners are positioned within broader ideological webs of meaning and identity. Furthermore, an understanding of second language socialization requires a recognition that the endpoints of the process will necessarily involve multiple, variable outcomes that are often tied to learners’ motivation, investment, and/or agency. Poole 1992offered one of the earliest studies of instructed second language socialization, following on the heels of research on young children’s first language development. Duff 1995 was foundational to this field, and a range of Duff’s studies show how adolescents and adults become acquainted with communicative practices that are associated with particular identities, activities, and disciplines (e.g., the acquisition of academic language and discourse). A preeminent overview and theoretical framework for this field of study is offered in Duff and Talmy 2011. Talmy 2008 adds a crucial critical dimension to our understanding of second language socialization, examining high school–aged ESL learners in the United States. Willett 1995 is an important piece for those interested in young bilingual children who are developing a second language in school. Willett shows that gendered practices impact the access that learners have to meaningful interaction in the second language. Emerging work examines socialization into foreign languages. Cook 2008, for example, reports on a study of language socialization of learners of Japanese as a foreign language. Kramsch 2010examines the intersection of culture, identity, and instructed second/foreign languages in a variety of classroom and online contexts.
Cook, Haruko M. 2008. Socializing identities through speech style: Learners of Japanese as a foreign language. Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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Cook’s significant contribution examines how American university student learners of Japanese as a foreign language are socialized into the complex, socially indexical speech styles.
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Duff, Patricia. 1995. An ethnography of communication in immersion classrooms in Hungary.TESOL Quarterly 29:505–537.
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Duff examines language socialization in both home language and second language immersion medium classrooms in a bilingual school in Hungary, showing that the ideologies and discourses into which children were being socialized varied across these two language modalities.
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Duff, Patricia, and Steven Talmy. 2011. Language socialization approaches to second language acquisition: Social, cultural, and linguistic development in additional languages. InAlternative approaches to second language acquisition. Edited by Dwight Atkinson, 96–116. London: Routledge.
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This important piece outlines a theory of second language acquisition as a process of language socialization, and outlines an ethnographic, discourse-analytic approach to studying this process.
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Kramsch, Claire. 2010. The multilingual subject. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
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This piece is not only theoretically rich in its treatment of the interconnection between language, identity, and culture, but it is also methodologically innovative as it draws on multiple sources of data, including not only learners’ language production, but also interviews, learner diaries, and online communication.
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Poole, Deborah. 1992. Language socialization in the second language classroom. Language Learning 42:593–616.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1992.tb01045.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In one of the earliest studies to address language socialization in a second language learning context, Poole examined how classroom routines scaffold and support learners’ acquisition of English as a second language in the United States.
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Talmy, Steven. 2008. The cultural productions of the ESL student at Tradewinds High: Contingency, multidirectionality and identity in L2 socialization. Applied Linguistics 29:619–644.
DOI: 10.1093/applin/amn011Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Talmy’s work, including this piece, contributes a unique, critically informed perspective on the situation of adolescent English language learners in secondary school in the United States, as they undergo the process of acquiring English, with a special focus on multiplicity and identity.
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Willett, Jerri. 1995. Becoming first graders in an L2: An ethnographic study of language socialization. TESOL Quarterly 29:473–503.
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This piece examines how young, emergent bilingual boys and young girls acquiring English as a second language in the United States develop gendered practices for engaging in a first grade classroom discourse, in ways that are consequential for their acquisition of, and access to, the English language.
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Multilingualism, Heritage Language, and Immigration
Most situations of language socialization involve children’s development not only of one language (and its multiple registers, styles, genres, and varieties), but also of multiple languages. It is not always feasible, nor is it always recommended, to distinguish between “first” versus “second,” “foreign,” or “additional” languages. Researchers recognize that multilingual individuals use their many communicative resources in multiple, complex ways in order to enact, inhabit, and recognize a range of culturally intelligible subjectivities. The use of multilingual semiotic resources often occurs in situations of linguistic, cultural, and social contact, and involves hybrid, syncretic, and rapidly changing communicative practices. Furthermore, in such situations of contact, distinct languages, cultural orientations, and identities are often subject to powerful frameworks of evaluation in which they are stratified in relation to each other, with significant consequences for languages and their speakers. Detailed ethnographies of communication have shown how children acquire and use their range of linguistic resources within family, community, and school settings (Valdés 1996; Vasquez, et al. 1994; Zentella 1997). Fader 2009 (cited under Morality and Religion) is an elegant analysis based on long-term, rigorous ethnographic research among Hasidic Jews in the United States that ties gender and bilingual language socialization as they relate to religious practice. With another tie to religious practice, Baquedano-López 2000 (cited under Morality and Religion) examines the role ofdoctrina (catechism) classes in language socialization among Mexican American children, showing the important connection between language, identity, and culture. More recently, language socialization researchers have examined situations of “heritage language” socialization, or situations in which children acquire a language that is tied to their families’ history, especially in immigrant or indigenous communities in which language shift is occurring. He 2012 provides both excellent scholarship and comprehensive reviews of scholarship in this area. Wei 1994 offers a rich analysis of intergenerational language use in a Chinese immigrant family in Britain. Reyes and Lo 2009 is a state-of-the-art volume in the field of linguistic anthropology, presenting a range of scholarship on the use, variation, and socialization of language among Asian Americans, including many pieces that explore different aspects of the roles of bilingualism and heritage language socialization in Asian Americans’ lives. García-Sánchez’s fascinating volume (García-Sánchez 2014) investigates how cultural, ethnic, and linguistic difference is discursively constructed by bilingual, immigrant children in Spain. (See also Baquedano-López 2000, Fader 2009 and Fung 1999, all cited under Morality and Religion; Bayley and Schecter 2003, cited under Anthologies; and the section on Language Shift, Endangerment, and Revitalization).
García-Sánchez, Inmaculada. 2014. Language and Muslim immigrant childhoods: The politics of belonging. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118323939Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a detailed ethnographic, discourse-analytic study of Muslim immigrant children’s experiences and negotiation of difference and belonging across a range of contexts—from school, to home, to play, to medical encounters—as they navigate complex cultural, racial, national, and linguistic identities in Spain.
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He, Agnes Weiyun. 2012. Heritage language socialization. In The handbook of language socialization. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 587–609. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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This chapter presents the most comprehensive review available of language socialization research on heritage language development. It reviews ethnographic, discourse analytic work in this area, and reports He’s own research on Chinese American children’s language socialization into Mandarin as a heritage language.
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Reyes, Angela, and Adrienne Lo, eds. 2009. Beyond yellow English: Toward a linguistic anthropology of Asian Pacific America. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195327359.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Many of the linguistic anthropological chapters in this volume adopt a language socialization methodology to illuminate how Asian American identity, language, and cultural orientations are inextricably linked in children’s lives, yet always dynamic, relational, and situated. A number of pieces examine older children’s experiences outside of the home.
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Valdés, Guadalupe. 1996. Con respeto: Bridging the distances between culturally diverse families and schools: An ethnographic portrait. New York: Teachers College Press.
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Valdés provides a rich ethnographic portrait of ten Mexican immigrant families’ experiences as they raise their children in the United States.
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Vasquez, Olga A., Lucinda Pease-Alvarez, and Sheila M. Shannon. 1994. Pushing boundaries: Language in a Mexicano community. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511663970Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Following children’s interactions at both home and school, this study examines how Mexican immigrant children in Northern California are socialized into elaborated uses of language at home that provide a strong foundation for their acquisition of academic language at school.
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Wei, Li. 1994. Three generations, two languages, one family: Language choice and language shift in a Chinese community in Britain. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
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This volume explores how one Chinese immigrant family undergoes a process of language shift in Britain, including detailed sociolinguistic analysis of language use among three generations of Chinese-origin family members.
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Zentella, Ana-Celia. 1997. Growing up bilingual: Puerto Rican children in New York. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
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This study provides a detailed portrait of how Puerto Rican children in New York are socialized into a range of hybrid, code-switching practices across multiple sites of their community, and the ties that these practices have to broader social and political phenomena.
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Cultural Values, Beliefs, and Ideologies
As language socialization researchers frequently point out, the process of socialization involves not only acquiring a range of linguistic and communicative practices, but it is also inextricably tied to culturally specific values, norms, beliefs, and ideologies. Thus, children’s process of becoming through language involves the simultaneous exposure to, and negotiation of, broader cultural ideas and mores. A good deal of language socialization research has focused on the process by which children are introduced to the philosophies and underpinnings of their culture, including the socialization of Morality and Religion, the socialization of Aesthetics, the socialization of Literacypractices, Narrative socialization, and the socialization into Food and Taste, among others.
Morality and Religion
The role of morality in human development is a central theme in most language socialization research, for this field takes as its purpose to shed light on ways in which children’s local, moment-by-moment communicative practices provide information about the broader social, cultural, and moral orientations of their community. A good deal of earlier work in language socialization examined how shaming and teasing routines highlight for children the moral expectations of their families and communities (Fung 1999). Smith-Hefner 1999 offers a detailed ethnographic account of the complexity of moral socialization among diasporic families. Lo and Fung 2012 provides a detailed overview that updates this perspective on morality by adopting a more critical lens on dichotomies of shame versus guilt. The insightful set of papers in the special issue of Discourse Studies on “Morality as Family Practice” (Ochs and Kremer-Sadlik 2007) illuminates how morality is socialized within families. Sterponi 2003 outlines a powerful framework for examining morality as a situated social practice that is constituted in the moment within unfolding social interactions. A growing body of work examines the role of religious institutions in socializing morality, as well as the role of the family in socializing religious practice (Baquedano-López 2000, Fader 2009, Moore 2008).
Baquedano-López, Patricia. 2000. Narrating community in doctrina classes. Narrative Inquiry10.2: 1–24.
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This paper examines Spanish-medium, Catholic catechism classes in the United States, considering their role in bilingual language socialization, heritage language socialization, and religious socialization.
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Fader, Ayala. 2009. Mitzvah girls: Bringing up the next generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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Fader’s work weaves together several important strands in language socialization: the interlinkages between bilingual language development, gender, and religious/moral education in a Hasidic Jewish community in the United States.
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Fung, Heidi. 1999. Becoming a moral child: The socialization of shame among young Chinese children. Ethnos 27.2: 180–209.
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This important paper on the role of shaming in children’s moral socialization laid the groundwork for much subsequent work on shaming.
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Lo, Adrienne, and Heidi Fung. 2012. Language socialization and shaming. In The handbook of language socialization. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 169–189. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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This insightful and critical review of research examining the role of shaming in children’s moral socialization questions the age-old dichotomy between guilt cultures and shame cultures, and provides illustrations of how shame operates in socializing encounters.
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Moore, Leslie C. 2008. Body, text and talk in Maroua Fulbe Qurʾanic schooling. Text & Talk28.5: 643–665.
DOI: 10.1515/TEXT.2008.033Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This paper examines classroom interactions, lesson organization, and curriculum of Qurʾanic schooling among the Fulbe people of Maroua, Cameroon. The analysis examines the conjunction of text, talk, and embodied communicative practices, as children are socialized into responsibility for sacred texts.
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Ochs, Elinor, and Tami Kremer-Sadlik, eds. 2007. Special issue: Morality as family practice.Discourse Studies 18.1.
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This special issue includes a range of chapters that explore how morality is socialized and enacted in family interactions. The introduction to the special issue provides a rich theoretical framework for understanding how morality is transmitted, maintained, and/or transformed across generations within the family.
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Smith-Hefner, Nancy. 1999. Khmer-American: Identity and moral education in a diaspora community. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
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Smith-Hefner examines how two distinct modes of morality are socialized within Khmer American families, both a personal (“knowing oneself”) mode of morality and a positional (“knowing one’s place”) mode of morality. Her ethnography connects family socializing practices to broader intergenerational histories and experience among these families.
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Sterponi, Laura. 2003. Account episodes in family discourse: The making of morality in everyday interaction. Discourse Studies 5.1: 79–100.
DOI: 10.1177/14614456030050010401Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Sterponi’s theoretically rich and detailed, fine-grained analysis of everyday Italian family interactions identifies account episodes as a crucial locus in which children develop an understanding of morality as a situated practice.
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Aesthetics
The study of poetics, performance, and creativity has constituted a core focus of anthropological linguistics since the early days of the field. Much of this work has been influenced by Hymes’s call to focus on ethnopoetics over text structure or grammar. Recent work in language socialization in particular has examined the role of creativity in children’s socialization through play (Sawyer 1997), the language socialization of musical aesthetics (Duranti 2010), the role of a hip-hop style in language learning within our current globalized context (Alim, et al. 2009; Ibrahim 1999), and the poetics of performance as they play out in language revitalization projects of indigenous languages (Carr and Meek 2013), among others. The power of arts education to facilitate both language and academic/cognitive development among youth is the focus of much of Heath’s research with youth: an informative overview of her work on this topic is included here (Heath 2004). Creativity, poetics, and improvisation have also been examined in children’s socialization in peer group play activities, as in Howard 2009. (See also works cited under Play and Peer Interactions.)
Alim, H. Samy, Awad Ibrahim, and Alastair Pennycook, eds. 2009. Global linguistic flows: Hip hop cultures, youth identities, and the politics of language. London and New York: Routledge.
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This edited volume explores the localization and globalization of hip-hop as a communicative style, illuminating how hip-hop as an aesthetic practice is taken up by youth around the world.
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Carr, Gerald R., and Barbra Meek. 2013. The poetics of language revitalization: Text, performance and change. Journal of Folklore Research 50:191–216.
DOI: 10.2979/jfolkrese.50.1-3.191Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece, included in a special issue on Hymes’s “ethnopoetics,” examines how aboriginal language texts are incorporated into language revitalization programs through performances that alter or transform the poetics of these texts.
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Duranti, Alessandro. 2010. The relevance of Husserl’s theory to language socialization.Journal of linguistic anthropology 19.2: 205–226.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.01031.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Drawing on long-term research on jazz education, Duranti examines how community members gradually modify their attitudes over time in response to their participation in interactions with other members of the community. This piece considers the implications for both children’s language socialization and language socialization into the musical aesthetics of jazz improvisation.
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Heath, Shirley Brice. 2004. Learning language and strategic thinking through the arts.Reading Research Quarterly 39.3: 338–342.
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In this overview of her extensive research on the intersections between linguistic, cognitive, and artistic development in community-based, informal art education programs for youth, Heath explicates the advantages of the arts for developing powerful communicative competencies and for fostering academic success.
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Howard, Kathryn. 2009. Breaking in and spinning out: Repetition and de-calibration in Thai children’s play genres. Language in Society 38.3: 339–363.
DOI: 10.1017/S0047404509090526Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Howard investigates how Northern Thai, bilingual children adeptly deploy and creatively tweak playful genres of communicative practice that bend the boundaries between the languages in their repertoires.
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Ibrahim, Awad E. K. M. 1999. Becoming black: Rap and hip-hop, race, gender, identity, and the politics of ESL learning. TESOL Quarterly 33.3: 349–369.
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Ibrahim’s beautifully theorized, critical scholarship on racial identity among African immigrant youth in Canada who are acquiring English as a second language shows how they align to a masculine, global “black” identity through the medium of hip-hop.
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Sawyer, R. Keith. 1997. Pretend play as improvisation: Conversation in the preschool classroom. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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In this enlightening analysis of young children’s pretend play, Sawyer argues that this form of interaction is a crucial site for the development of creativity and language, as it requires the children to creatively improvise and imagine hypothetical situations and worlds.
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Literacy
A language socialization approach to children’s literacy development extends well beyond the cognitive skills needed to decode and comprehend the printed text. Rather, a language socialization approach examines the culturally based meanings, perceptions, and ideologies surrounding literacy and literate personhood as they intersect in a community’s ways of transmitting literacy from one generation to the next. Heath’s influential scholarship on the diversity of family literacy practices across social communities was part of a broader, international push to understand the ways in which literacy and culture were intertwined (see Heath 1983, cited under Foundational Scholarship). While the full scope of such ethnographic inquiry into literacy as a social practice across cultures is too broad to report here, this section includes the contributions of language socialization scholars who explore how literacy and literacy practices are developed over time through children’s participation in literacy activities. The edited volumes Cook-Gumperz 2006 and Schieffelin and Gilmore 1986 offer ethnographic, discourse-analytic, and functional linguistic approaches to understanding how literacies as social practices are acquired by children. Brian Street’s extensive ethnographic research articulating an ideological view of literacy as opposed to prior “autonomous” views of literacy, in Street 1984, is highly influential and de rigueur as a starting point for anyone pursuing this line of inquiry. Collins 1996 offers not only a fine-grained analysis of children’s participation in leveled reading groups at school, but also a critical perspective on the ideology of text into which this participation socializes children. Schieffelin 2000 and Kulick and Stroud 1990 both examine the effects of the introduction of literacy in traditional societies. Sterponi 2007 argues that literacy can be viewed as a kind of habitus into which children are socialized through participation in literacy activities. (See also Moore 2008, cited under Morality and Religion.)
Collins, James. 1996. Socialization to text: Structure and contradiction in schooled literacy. InNatural histories of discourse. Edited by Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban, 203–228. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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In this piece, Collins examines how school reading groups at different levels differentially socialize children into ideologies of “reading,” showing that children in low-level reading groups have fewer opportunities to engage in meaningful interactions about the text.
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Cook-Gumperz, Jenny, ed. 2006. The social construction of literacy. 2d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511617454Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume includes chapters by a number of top scholars elucidating how children acquire literacy, how literacy is socialized in school, and the effects of schooling on literacy.
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Kulick, Don, and Christopher Stroud. 1990. Christianity, cargo and ideas of self: Patterns of literacy in a Papua New Guinea village. Man, n.s., 25:286–304.
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This piece constitutes an illustrative analysis of how literacy practices are tied to cultural notions of personhood, religion, and self in Papua New Guinea.
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Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2000. Introducing Kaluli literacy: A chronology of influences. InRegimes of language. Edited by Paul Kroskrity, 293–327. Santa Fe, NM: School of America Research Press.
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This insightful, sociohistorically situated analysis examines the effects of the introduction of literacy by Christian missionaries on a traditional society.
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Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Perry Gilmore, eds. 1986. The acquisition of literacy: Ethnographic perspectives. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
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This collection of ethnographic and discourse-analytic chapters on children’s acquisition of literacy includes many superb chapters reporting research on socialization into a community’s social constructions of literacy and literacy practices across a broad range of cultural contexts.
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Sterponi, Laura. 2007. Clandestine interactional reading: Intertextuality and double-voicing under the desk. Linguistics and Education 18:1–23.
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Sterponi theorizes literacy as a collaborative practice involving multiple engagements around text that are not always sanctioned or visible within schooled literacies.
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Street, Brian V. 1984. Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
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Street reconceptualized the field of cross-cultural literacy studies in this work, articulating a sense of literacy as a social practice that is not only situated in particular moments and events, but also within broader historical and ideological contexts.
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Narrative
Stories are universally recognized as a powerful means to transmit cultural values. Through close examination of everyday, interactive narrative activities between interlocutors, scholars of language socialization go beyond the content of narrative (what is represented) to explore interactive storytelling as a complex vehicle for transmitting cultural values, beliefs, and knowledge; as a medium for developing self-awareness and identity; as a strategy for socializing a wide range of social, moral, and interpersonal structures and expectations; and as a culturally specific communicative genre that children must master. Peggy Miller’s extensive body of comparative research has explored the culturally distinctive ways in which children develop self-awareness, utilizing classic language socialization methodologies (longitudinal, ethnographic, discourse-analytic research on recurrent and routine interactions in young children’s lives across class and cultural settings). Treating narrative as both a tool and a target of socialization, and recognizing its representational as well as its interactive and performative functions, Miller, et al. 1996, for example, compares how American and Taiwanese middle-class children’s early stories of past experience contribute to their developing awareness of self through variation in topics, participant structure, and functions of narrative. Ochs’ scholarship on narrative socialization has examined how these interactions simultaneously foster children’s cultural, social, linguistic, and cognitive development.Ochs, et al. 1989 conceptualizes families as “activity systems” in which the interactive narrative genre itself serves as a social scaffold for children’s developing problem-solving skills, while simultaneously structuring family roles and relationships, and producing a family’s unique moral character. Through the social and a cognitive activity of storytelling, they showed variation in the extent to which the narrative “problem” is framed and reframed collaboratively by interlocutors, as children are socialized into differing perspectives on the narrative problem. Ochs, et al. 1992 argues that such activity provides early exposure to skills that are crucial for academic discourse, such as taking and expressing different perspectives on events, and evaluating and challenging competing theories about problematic events. Paugh 2012 extends the analysis of narrative beyond stories of past experience and into future-oriented narratives—“speculation”—about adults’ work issues. A large body of work has examined the rich narrative practices of non-mainstream children and the ways in which narrative becomes a technology for social differentiation and inequality, such asMichaels 1991, which shows that children’s multiple narrative practices are misrecognized, negatively evaluated, and marginalized by mainstream teachers in school. Too extensive for an adequate review here, those interested in this area are directed to Miller, et al. 2012 for an authoritative review of scholarship on narrative socialization. (See also Heath 1983, cited underFoundational Scholarship; Goodwin 1990, cited under Play and Peer Interactions; and Ochs and Taylor 1995, Wortham 2006, and Rymes 2001, all cited under Social Identity and Subjectivity.)
Michaels, Sarah. 1991. The dismantling of narrative. In Developing narrative structure. Edited by Alyssa McCabe and Carole Peterson, 303–351. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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Michaels closely examined instances of African American children’s storytelling during sharing time in elementary classrooms, analyzing how the teacher intervenes in their narratives in ways that target non-mainstream communicative practices as aberrant.
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Miller, Peggy J., Heidi Fung, and Judy Mintz. 1996. Self-construction through narrative practices: A Chinese and American comparison of early socialization. Ethos 24:1–44.
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Comparing personal storytelling by very young children within middle-class American families in Chicago and middle-class Chinese families in Taipei, this study examines narrative as both a representational and interactive medium, analyzing its role in young children’s developing awareness of the self.
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Miller, Peggy J., Michele Koven, and Shumin Lin. 2012. Language socialization and narrative. In The handbook of language socialization. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 190–208. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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This comprehensive review examines scholarship on narrative socialization across cultural contexts, with sections on the heterogeneity of narrative practice in early socialization, the socialization of self through narrative, narrative inequality, and marginalized narrative practices.
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Ochs, Elinor, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor. 1989. Detective stories at dinnertime: Problem-solving through co-narration. Cultural Dynamics 2.2: 238–257.
DOI: 10.1177/092137408900200206Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The researchers examined dinnertime interactions among Caucasian American families of two distinct social classes during the evening hours over a short term. Videotaped narrative episodes were analyzed as collaborative problem-solving events in which children are socialized into both family social structures and narrative practices.
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Ochs, Elinor, Carolyn Taylor, Dina Rudolph, and Ruth Smith. 1992. Storytelling as a theory‐building activity. Discourse Processes 15.1: 37–72.
DOI: 10.1080/01638539209544801Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This discourse-analytic study examined a corpus of dinnertime narratives in Caucasian American families of various social class backgrounds. Storytelling was analyzed as a rich cognitive and communicative activity in which children develop an understanding of differing perspectives, theories, and understandings.
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Paugh, Amy. 2012. Speculating about work: Dinnertime narratives among dual-earner American families. Text & Talk 32.5: 615–636.
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The author examines a corpus of dinnertime interactions among American middle-class families to explore how children are socialized into specific cultural orientations toward work and professional life through their participation in future-oriented, problem-solving narratives about this topic.
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Food and Taste
Scholars have investigated how family mealtime interactions socialize children both explicitly and implicitly into important attitudes, behaviors, and ideologies surrounding food choice, sharing, and mealtime comportment. Ochs and Shohet 2006 reviews the cross-cultural literature on the socialization of commensality and offers a theoretical framework for understanding mealtime socialization, arguing that family meals constitute a “cultural site”—“historically durable yet transformable, socially organized and organizing, and tempospatially situated arenas, which are laden with symbolic meanings and mediated by material artifacts” (p. 35)—in which cultural frameworks of commensality are reflected, recreated, and transformed. Ochs, et al. 1996 introduced the notion of “food morality” as a set of understandings about interactions with and about food, including mealtime comportment and communication, the organization of the mealtime activity, attitudes about food, and expectations about food choice. The authors utilized Bourdieu’s distinction between “taste of necessity” and “taste of luxury” to illustrate how Americans frame food choice as a matter of obligation, while Italians frame food choice as a matter of pleasure. Subsequent work built on this notion by exploring culturally based ideologies regarding “healthy” eating. Karrebæk 2013argues that the category “healthy food” is culturally specific, and often naturalized. Karrabaek shows how Danish kindergarten teachers deploy this category to marginalize the food practices of non-Danish children in schools. Paugh and Izquierdo 2009 shows how “healthy” food choice is interwoven with notions of morality, as both parents’ and children’s treatment of food choice is interconnected with their sense of what it means to be a “good” parent or child. Another dimension of food morality involves expectations about social roles, communication, and comportment at mealtime. Blum-Kulka 1997 investigated the communicative expectations and pragmatic practices at mealtimes across several cultural settings, while Blum-Kulka 2008 provides a comprehensive review of such work across cultures. Due to such cultural expectations around mealtime behavior and communication, these frameworks are taken up in social actors’ performances and evaluations of identity. For example, Aronsson and Gottzén 2011 shows how generationally distinct stances are deployed by social actors to actively position themselves and negotiate generational and age identities. Karrebæk 2013 also shows how food choices become indexical of group belonging.
Aronsson, Karen, and Lucas Gottzén. 2011. Generational positions at a family dinner: Food morality and social order. Language in Society 40.4: 405–426.
DOI: 10.1017/S0047404511000455Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examining intergenerational dinnertime interactions in Swedish middle-class families, the authors explore how food practices and affective stance-marking are deployed by social actors to position themselves along social age and generational moral continua.
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Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1997. Dinner talk: Cultural patterns of sociability and socialization in family discourse. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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The author reports on a study of three distinct secular, middle-class Jewish communities: Jewish Americans, American immigrants to Israel, and Israelis. Examining the norms and routines of social interaction, politeness, and pragmatic patterns of speech, she discusses how these practices reflect distinct orientations to American, Israeli, and Jewish cultural frameworks.
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Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 2008. Language socialization and family dinnertime discourse. InEncyclopedia of language and education. Vol. 8, Language socialization. 2d ed. Edited by Patricia A. Duff and Nancy H. Hornberger, 87–99. New York: Springer.
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This chapter provides a comprehensive review of previous research on the process of language socialization at family dinnertime across cultures from a range of perspectives, with suggestions for future research.
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Karrebæk, Martha Sif. 2013. Lasagna for breakfast: The respectable child and cultural norms of eating practices in a Danish kindergarten classroom. Food, Culture & Society 16.1: 85–106.
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This study investigates how Danish kindergarten teachers respond to ethnically diverse children’s lunchtime eating practices at school, showing that teachers explicitly frame rye bread—a traditional Danish food—as the only acceptable “healthy” choice, as opposed to other culturally variable options.
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Ochs, Elinor, Clotilde Pontecorvo, and Alessandra Fasulo. 1996. Socializing taste. Ethnos61.1–2: 7–46.
DOI: 10.1080/00141844.1996.9981526Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study compares the negotiation of “food morality” in American and Italian family dinnertime interactions, showing that food choice is framed as a matter of obligation (Bourdieu’s “taste of necessity”) in American families versus a matter of preference or desire in Italian families (“taste of luxury”).
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Ochs, Elinor, and Merav Shohet. 2006. The cultural structuring of mealtime socialization. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development 111:35–49.
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This article offers a comprehensive review of scholarship on commensality across a wide range of cultures, revealing distinct expectations for the social organization of meals, food preferences, and food morality.
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Paugh, Amy, and Carolina Izquierdo. 2009. Why is this a battle every night?: Negotiating food and eating in American dinnertime interaction. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19.2: 185–204.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.01030.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Examining dinnertime interactions among dual-earner middle-class families in Los Angeles, this study demonstrates how negotiation over “healthy” food choices intersects with expectations regarding parenting practices and child behavior.
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Life Span and Expanding Contexts
Recent scholarship in language socialization has expanded beyond young children’s early acquisition and development of language within the family or village context, to new contexts and situations of language socialization across the life course. The research in this section represents a small sampling of some of the exciting and innovative work examining how learners’ development of communicative practices in multiple contexts, genres, registers, life stages, and settings continues throughout life as our social networks and participation in society continues to expand.
Play and Peer Interactions
Children’s understandings of language, cultural practice, and cultural values are developed not only in interactions with adults, but also substantially in their interactions with each other. Within their peer, play, and sibling interactions, children socialize each other into the culture, identities, communicative practices, and relationships that are specific to children’s, youth’s, and peers’ social worlds. Through their play with and representation of adult worlds, children present each other with their perspectives on the institutions, relationships, structures, and ideologies that they encounter outside of the peer group. This area of research is exceptionally rich in its depth and cross-cultural reach. Goodwin and Kyratzis 2012 (both authors are leaders in this area of research) offers an extensively comprehensive survey of previous literature. Cook-Gumperz, et al. 2011, written by leaders in this field, is an edited collection of work by top scholars in this area. Through close analysis of children’s conversational interactions in play activities, Goodwin 1990 examines how children negotiate status and relationships through interactional practices in their peer groups, and challenges traditional conceptions of gendered play practices. Goodwin 2006 examines how children use these practices to marginalize and exclude children within play activities. Thorne’s influential book (Thorne 1993) examines gendered practices that emerge among children at school. Children’s play within multilingual contexts has also been extensively examined, including studies of code-switching, language ideologies, and voice. Kyratzis, et al. 2010 is a special issue of Pragmatics that contains a range of important, recent scholarship on this topic. Cekaite and Aronsson 2005examines the role of language play in children’s socialization into second or additional languages. (See also Paugh 2013, cited under Language Shift, Endangerment, and Revitalization; Howard 2009and Sawyer 1997, both cited under Aesthetics; and Gee and Hayes 2011 and Thorne, et al. 2009, both cited under Digital and Online Contexts.)
Cekaite, Asta, and Karin Aronsson. 2005. Language play: A collaborative resource in children’s L2 learning. Applied Linguistics 26.2: 169–191.
DOI: 10.1093/applin/amh042Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece reports on research on the role of language play in second language acquisition of Swedish among diverse immigrant and refugee children to Sweden. This is a good starting point for those interested in the role of play in multilingual contexts.
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Cook-Gumperz, Jenny, William A. Corsaro, and Jurgen Streek, eds. 2011. Children’s worlds and children’s language. Reprint. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
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This edited collection, first published in 1986, includes a wealth of contributions by world-class scholars in the field of children’s peer culture, examining the co-development of children’s peer/sibling relationships and their linguistic development. The chapters follow this process of development within play activities and peer cultures across the preschool years through middle-childhood and adolescence.
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Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 1990. He-said-she-said: Talk as social organization among black children. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.
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Reporting long-term fieldwork with neighborhood African American children in Philadelphia, Goodwin examines a range of practices that the children use to construct and negotiate their social worlds within play activities. The work is superb in its detailed analysis of peer interaction.
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Goodwin, Marjorie Harness. 2006. The hidden life of girls: Games of stance, status and exclusion. Oxford: Blackwell.
DOI: 10.1002/9780470773567Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Goodwin closely shadowed girls’ play groups on a California elementary school’s playground, illuminating in rich detail the moment-by-moment stance-taking practices by which these ethnically diverse children negotiate conflict, traversing a range of fluid roles and identities, and excavating the multimodal semiotic means by which a micro-politics of exclusion is enacted.
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Goodwin, Marjorie Harness, and Amy Kyratzis. 2012. Peer language socialization. In The handbook of language socialization. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, Elinor Ochs, and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 365–390. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Arguably the most comprehensive review of research on children’s socialization in peer group contexts, this chapter outlines how children socialize their peers within particular peer group activities, such as gossip, storytelling, ritual insults, and pretend play, examining how children align and position themselves to particular peer-relevant identities and activities.
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Kyratzis, Amy, Jennifer Reynolds, and A.-C. Evaldsson, eds. 2010. Special issue: Heteroglossia and language ideologies in children’s peer play interactions. Pragmatics 20.4.
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This special issue of the journal Pragmatics includes important research on the multilingualism and voice within children’s peer interactions across cultures, and how language ideologies evolve and are reflected in these interactions.
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Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. London: Longman.
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Rampton’s work substantially reframed our understanding of code-switching among youth. In particular, he examines how youth appropriate ethnically inflected language styles as they fashion their own youth styles and identities within adolescent peer groups.
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Thorne, Barrie. 1993. Gender play: Boys and girls in school. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
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This is an important early work exploring how American elementary school children’s peer interactions at school create, maintain, and reproduce gendered identities.
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Digital and Online Contexts
Research on communicative practice within virtual, digital, and new media contexts is only recently emerging. Boellstorff 2008 is the first of its kind—a complete ethnography of a virtual society. In this work, Boellstorff conducted his research through a virtual avatar in the Second Life virtual reality game in order to document the history, social structure, and underlying philosophies that constitute this virtual social world. The book goes well beyond language socialization per se, but includes analyses of the role of language, the constitution of social groups, friendships, and multiple identities within this context. Thorne, et al. 2009 examines communicative practices of second language learners within online contexts, and how these forms of participation support second language development. The scholarship in Lam 2011 on transnational youth who reside in the United States explores how these youth use a range of multilingual social registers in digital media communications within distinct local, translocal, and transnational social networks in order to manage and maintain relationships across space and time. Gee and Hayes 2011 provides not only a detailed analysis of language and communicative practice as it occurs in various online settings, but also how people learn to engage effectively in online contexts through participation in these contexts, and how learning (more generally) occurs in these contexts.
Boellstorff, Tom. 2008. Coming of age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the virtually human. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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A groundbreaking approach to investigating human participation in virtual social worlds, this volume includes useful methodological information for researchers, as well as a rich ethnographic account of language and social practice in virtual environments.
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Gee, James. P., and E. R. Hayes. 2011. Language and learning in the digital age. New York: Routledge.
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This superb volume includes powerful theoretical frameworks for understanding how social actors engage in digital activities, as well as detailed examples of language use and learning that occur in these contexts.
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Lam, Wan Shun Eva. 2011. Multiliteracies on instant messaging in negotiating local, translocal, and transnational affiliations: A case of an adolescent immigrant. Reading Research Quarterly 44:377–397.
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This article reports on a detailed case study of one adolescent youth’s multilingual communicative practices in online contexts for the purpose of maintaining social relationships with peers and family members within and across national borders.
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Thorne, Steven L., Rebecca W. Black, and Julie M. Sykes. 2009. Second language use, socialization and learning in Internet interest communities and online gaming. Modern Language Journal 93:802–821.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00974.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece reviews prior research into the acquisition of language in online spaces, and reports research on how learners engage in creative and spontaneous communicative practices in both affinity spaces and online gaming activities.
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Professional Contexts
This insightful line of research investigates how individuals, as adults, become acquainted with the communicative practices of their profession, and how they are socialized into professional values, dispositions, and skills through language. Much of Charles Goodwin’s work has examined how professionals develop particular ways of “seeing” the world and interacting with the material objects and tools in order to engage in the socially situated, symbolic, and communicative practices of their profession. Included here is a particularly influential piece (Goodwin 1994) that provides an overview of this approach across several fields—archeology, law enforcement, and ship navigation. Mertz 2007, on the other hand, explores how aspiring lawyers’ educational experience in law school socializes them into particular textual epistemologies that underlie literacy practices in their profession, and Philips 1982 examines how lawyers are socialized into a specific professional legal genre, the cant. Jacobs-Huey 2006 illuminates the multiple contexts and contested territory in which the meanings and symbolism of hair and hair-care circulate in African American communities, examining how these meanings permeate professional socialization in the hair-care field. Roberts 2010 offers a survey of research on language socialization in the workplace.
Goodwin, Charles. 1994. Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96.3: 606–633.
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Goodwin explores how members of a profession are socialized into the discursive practices that constitute their profession, with a special emphasis on how the material objects of their profession are semiotically mediated through specific, situated, and embodied communicative work.
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Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. 2006. From the kitchen to the parlor: Language and becoming in African American women’s hair care. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195304169.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Professional training is shown to constitute but one site in which professionals are socialized into the meanings that underlie professional practice. This piece exemplifies the value of multisited semiotic research to our understanding of how social actors acquire and transform the meanings that frame their participation in society.
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Mertz, Elizabeth. 2007. The language of law school: Learning to think like a lawyer. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195183108.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This in-depth examination, which culminates many years of research into this professional context, shows how Socratic discourse in law school constitutes the primary modality for turning lawyers’ gaze from the moral and the emotional to the purely rational/legal dimensions of legal cases.
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Philips, Susan U. 1982. The language socialization of lawyers: Acquiring the cant. In Doing the ethnography of schooling. Edited by George Spindler, 176–209. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
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This article-length piece provides an illustration of how patterned communicative practices play an essential role in the socialization of adults into the legal professional community.
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Roberts, Celia. 2010. Language socialization in the workplace. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30:211–227.
DOI: 10.1017/S0267190510000127Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This piece reviews work on second language socialization in the workplace, showing how this process links up with processes of linguistic inequality in the context of a rapidly globalizing economy.
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