Language Socialization in Children’s Peer and Sibling-Kin Group Interactions

Abstract

This chapter reports on research that examines how children socialize one another to expected ways of thinking, feeling, and forms of social relationships in their peer and sibling-kin groups. First, we review the long period of development, with influences from many fields, that research on the field of children's peer language socialization has gone through. Second, we review key studies of the practices and resources used by children to take stances and position one another in the local social order of the peer or sibling-kin group in three major areas: (1) directives, as resources for building social organization; (2) children's assessments and evaluative commentary that occur in the midst of gossip and dispute activities; and (3) resources children make use of in pretend play, particularly how they take on different ``voices'' (Bakhtin, The dialogic imagination: Four essays (trans: Emerson, C., {&} Holquist, M.). Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; Paugh, Playing with languages: Children and change in a Caribbean village. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012) to make commentary on associations among social roles, identities, and languages within those pretend realities. We then review some of the work in progress and most recent trends in this research, particularly as they pertain to education. Future directions indicated are for more work on: children's groups in transnational and postcolonial settings; the moral and social orders of children; an increasing emphasis on the role of affect, embodiment, and multimodal resources; and looking at longer, unfolding trajectories of action in goal-oriented projects that involve cooperation as well as conflict and dispute (Goodwin and Cekaite, Journal of Pragmatics 46: 122--138, 2013).