Researching Language Socialization
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RESEARCHING LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION
INTRODUCTION
Language socialization is the human developmental process whereby a child or other novice (of any age) acquires the knowledge, skills, orientations, and practices that enable him or her to participate in the social life of a particular community. A key aspect of language socialization is the development of communicative competence, which involves acquiring proficiency in the use of a given language (or languages) as well as the culturally based knowledge that one needs in order to use language in culturally intelligible, socially appropriate ways (Garrett and Baquedano-López, 2002; Ochs and Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986a). Language socialization occurs primarily through the child or novice’s interactions with older or otherwise more experienced persons, although in most cases it involves interactions with peers as well. Socializing interactions may be highly formalized and regimented, designed explicitly to promote a particular kind of learning: a classroom lecture or a job training workshop, for example. But to a great extent, language socialization is the stuff of everyday social life: mundane interactions and activities ranging from the game of “peek-a-boo” played between a mother and her infant to the pointed but good-natured teasing that goes on among professional colleagues as they collaborate on a project, bringing their differing skills and varied levels of experience to the task at hand. This being the case, language socialization researchers who focus on formal education must venture outside the classroom and other institutional settings to gain understanding of how formal education relates to, and articulates with, their subjects’ home and community lives. As will be explained further, this holistic ethnographic perspective and the methodological framework out of which it emerges are among the key contributions of language socialization studies to research on language and education. Although many kinds of social interactions can be regarded as sites of socialization, language socialization research is not just the study of such interactions for their own sake. Language socialization researchers seek to understand how such interactions—taken collectively, not as isolated instances—shape the developmental trajectories of individuals, how they fit into larger systems of cultural meaning and practice, K. A. King and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 10: Research Methods in Language and Education, 189–201. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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and how they are reproduced and transformed over the course of time. Such understandings are made possible by another hallmark of language socialization research: its longitudinal perspective, which involves close tracking of individual developmental processes over extended periods of time and investigation of the sociocultural and historical contexts within which those processes unfold. Since its initial formulation in
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