Language Socialization in Children’s Religious Education

Abstract

In the past two decades the study of language socialization has become an important theoretical and methodological approach for understanding language acquisition and use, and for analyzing the ways in which communicative practices serve as tools whereby newcomers (e.g. a child, an immigrant, an apprentice) become competent members of society (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986; Ochs, 1988). Language socialization takes as its starting point the notion that language mediates the development of competencies, whether linguistic or cultural, over time. This chapter examines an aspect of this process of language socialization by paying close attention to the affiliative dimension constructed and employed in moment-to-moment classroom communicative practices while locating such practices in their ecological complexity; that is, as practices necessarily reflecting and constructing a larger context of interaction. Drawing from a three-year ethnographic and discourse analytic study of Saturday religious instruction at a St. Paul’s Catholic Church1 in Los Angeles, I describe the socialization of Mexican children into particular social identities in a class conducted in Spanish called doctrina and in an English-based catechism class. The chapter also discusses the ways in which the larger political context of the State of California influences local parish language policies, and in turn has consequences for the socialization of Mexican children at the parish, that is, for their acquisition of language and of particular cultural worldviews.