Abstract
Language socialization research is concerned with the ways in which children or other novices (of any age) acquire language as well as the knowledge, skills, orientations, and practices that enable them to participate in the social life of a particular community. The language socialization approach is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on insights and methods from anthropology, sociology, linguistics, psychology, education, and allied fields. Four key methodological features are essential to language socialization research: a longitudinal study design; field-based collection and analysis of a substantial corpus of naturalistic audio and/or audio-video data; a holistic, theoretically informed ethnographic perspective; and attention to both micro and macro levels of analysis, as well as to linkages between them. This integrated, multidisciplinary methodological approach has yielded important findings concerning such matters as the agency of learners, the effects of continuities and disjunctures between home- and classroom-based practices, and the sociocultural dynamics of language shift and other far-reaching processes of transformation and change.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Baquedano-López, P. (2001). Creating social identities through doctrina narratives. In A. Duranti (Ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader (pp. 343–358). Oxford: Blackwell.
Berman, E. (2014). Negotiating age: Direct speech and the sociolinguistic production of childhood in the Marshall Islands. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 24(2), 109–132.
Capps, L., & Ochs, E. (1995). Constructing panic: The discourse of agoraphobia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cook, H. M. (1999). Language socialization in Japanese elementary schools: Attentive listening and reaction turns. Journal of Pragmatics, 31(11), 1443–1465.
Duff, P. A. (1995). An ethnography of communication in immersion classrooms in Hungary. TESOL Quarterly, 29(3), 505–537.
Duff, P. A., Wong, P., & Early, M. (2000). Learning language for work and life: The linguistic socialization of immigrant Canadians seeking careers in healthcare. The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne des Langues Vivantes, 57(1), 9–57.
Dunn, C. D. (1999). Toward the study of communicative development as a life-span process. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 30(4), 451–454.
Duranti, A., Ochs, E., & Ta’ase, E. K. (1995). Change and tradition in literacy instruction in a Samoan American community. Educational Foundations, 9(4), 57–74.
Duranti, A., Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (Eds.). (2012). The handbook of language socialization. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Fader, A. (2009). Mitzvah girls: Bringing up the next generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
García-Sánchez, I. M. (2014). Language and Muslim immigrant childhoods: The politics of belonging. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Garrett, P. B. (2005). What a language is good for: Language socialization, language shift, and the persistence of code-specific genres in St. Lucia. Language in Society, 34(3), 327–361.
Garrett, P. B. (2007). Language socialization and the (re)production of bilingual subjectivities. In M. Heller (Ed.), Bilingualism: A social approach (pp. 233–256). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garrett, P. B., & Baquedano-López, P. (2002). Language socialization: Reproduction and continuity, transformation and change. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 339–361.
Goodwin, C. (2004). A competent speaker who can’t speak: The social life of aphasia. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 14(2), 151–170.
Gutiérrez, K., Baquedano-López, P., & Alvarez, H. (2001). Using hybridity to build literacy in urban classrooms. In M. de la Luz Reyes & J. J. Halcón (Eds.), The best for our children: Latina/Latino voices in literacy (pp. 122–141). New York: Teachers College Press.
He, A. W. (2001). The language of ambiguity: Practices in Chinese heritage language classes. Discourse Studies, 3(1), 75–96.
Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, K. M. (2004). Socializing respect at school in Northern Thailand. Working Papers in Educational Linguistics, 20(1), 1–30.
Howard, K. M. (2007). Kinterm usage and hierarchy in Thai children’s peer groups. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 17(2), 204–230.
Kramsch, C. (Ed.). (2002). Language acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives. New York: Continuum.
Kulick, D. (1992). Language shift and cultural reproduction: Socialization, self, and syncretism in a Papua New Guinean village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kulick, D., & Schieffelin, B. B. (2004). Language socialization. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp. 349–368). Oxford: Blackwell.
Meek, B. A. (2010). We are our language: An ethnography of language revitalization in a northern Athabaskan community. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Minks, A. (2013). Voices of play: Miskitu children’s speech and song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Moore, L. C. (2004). Multilingualism and second language acquisition in the Northern Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. In G. Echu & S. G. Obeng (Eds.), Africa meets Europe: Language contact in West Africa (pp. 131–147). New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Moore, L. C. (2013). Qur’anic school sermons as a site for sacred and second language socialization. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 34(5), 445–458.
Ochs, E. (1988). Culture and language development: Language acquisition and language socialization in a Samoan village. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, E. (2002). Becoming a speaker of culture. In C. Kramsch (Ed.), Language acquisition and language socialization: Ecological perspectives (pp. 99–120). London: Continuum.
Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (1984). Language acquisition and socialization: Three developmental stories and their implications. In R. A. Shweder & R. A. LeVine (Eds.), Culture theory: Essays in mind, self and emotion (pp. 276–320). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ochs, E., & Schieffelin, B. B. (1995). The impact of language socialization on grammatical development. In P. Fletcher & B. MacWhinney (Eds.), The handbook of child language (pp. 73–94). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
Ohta, A. S. (1999). Interactional routines and the socialization of interactional style in adult learners of Japanese. Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 1493–1512.
Paugh, A. L. (2005). Learning about work at dinnertime: Language socialization in dual-earner American families. Discourse and Society, 16(1), 55–78.
Paugh, A. L. (2012). Playing with languages: Children and change in a Caribbean village. New York: Berghahn.
Schieffelin, B. B. (1990). The give and take of everyday life: Language socialization of Kaluli children. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schieffelin, B. B., & Ochs, E. (1986a). Language socialization. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15, 163–191.
Schieffelin, B. B., & Ochs, E. (Eds.). (1986b). Language socialization across cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schieffelin, B. B., & Ochs, E. (1996). The microgenesis of competence: Methodology in language socialization. In D. Slobin, J. Gerhardt, A. Kyratzis & J. Guo (Eds.), Social interaction, social context, and language: Essays in honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp (pp. 251–264). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Smith, B. K. (2016). Turning language socialization ontological: Material things and the semiotics of scaling time in Peruvian Aymara boyhood. Language and Communication, 46, 42–50.
Vasquez, O. A., Pease-Alvarez, L., & Shannon, S. M. (1994). Pushing boundaries: Language and culture in a Mexicano community. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Watson-Gegeo, K. A. (1992). Thick explanation in the ethnographic study of child socialization: A longitudinal study of the problem of schooling for Kwara’ae (Solomon Islands) children. New Directions for Child Development, 58, 51–66.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this entry
Cite this entry
Garrett, P.B. (2016). Researching Language Socialization. In: King, K., Lai, YJ., May, S. (eds) Research Methods in Language and Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02329-8_21-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02329-8_21-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-02329-8
eBook Packages: Springer Reference EducationReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Education