Language Socialization and Language Shift Among School‐Aged Children

Abstract

Language socialization research examines how novices are socialized into communities of practice across the life course, including how they are socialized to use language appropriately in culturally significant activities, and how they are socialized through language into local values, beliefs, theories, and conceptions of the world. Adopting an ethnographic, discourse analytic approach, this research has illuminated the local, contingent, and contested nature of language socialization as it occurs through language in moment-by-moment interactions between social actors who construct their social worlds together through discursive action. Language socialization research seeks linkages between this local level at which culturally significant activities are constructed by participants, the social structures and institutional settings of a community, and larger political and economic processes of globalization, modernization, and social change. The goals, trajec-tories, and practices of language socialization vary across cultures as local conceptions and theories of language, childhood, child development , personhood, teaching, and learning vary. Many language socialization studies conducted in multilingual societies have explored the interconnections between the process of language socialization and widespread processes of language change, maintenance, and shift. Focusing on research conducted in multilingual communities outside the USA, this chapter examines the role of language ideologies, schooling, home-school connections, and peer/sibling groups in school-aged children's language socialization, and the impact of this process on language shift. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S Much of the early, pioneering work on language socialization examined small-scale monolingual societies, focusing in particular on caregiver-child interactions in the home (Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1990). These early studies laid the groundwork for later research on more linguistically heterogeneous communities by examining how children come to