Language Socialization and Second/Foreign Language and Multilingual Education in Non‐Western Settings

Abstract

Language socialization research documents and theorizes the diversity of cultural paths to communicative competence and community mem-bership. From this theoretical perspective, linguistic and social devel-opment are viewed as interdependent and inextricably embedded in the contexts in which they occur. Language socialization is a life-long process, and a collaborative one. Through participation in recurrent interactions with more expert members of the community, novices are socialized through the use of language and socialized to use language (Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Garrett (2006) identifies four core methodological features of lan-guage socialization research: (1) a longitudinal research design, (2) field-based collection and analysis of a substantial corpus of audio or video recorded naturalistic discourse, (3) a holistic, theoretically informed ethnographic perspective, and (4) attention to micro-and macrolevels of analysis, and to linkages between them. Taking an ethnographic and interactional discourse analytic approach, researchers identify patterns in novice–veteran interactions and study how they shape individual developmental processes. Furthermore, they seek to understand how these patterns and processes relate to community norms, values, and ideologies, as well as to large-scale social, cultural, and historical processes. The paradigm was formulated by linguistic anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin, both of whom had conducted extensive fieldwork in small-scale non-Western societies (Ochs in Madagascar and Western Samoa, Schieffelin in Papua New Guinea). They observed in these communities patterns of caregiver–child interactions and child language development that challenged some assumptions about first language acquisition that had emerged from research conducted almost exclusively with white middle-class Europeans and North Americans 1 The term non-Western is used here to refer to regions of the world other than Europe or those areas in which the dominant culture is European. (such as the universality and necessity of Baby Talk). These discoveries demonstrated the need for a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspec-tive on linguistic and social development, one that placed sociocultural context at the center of analysis. In their seminal 1984 article, Ochs and Schieffelin compared " devel-opmental stories " from Samoan, Kaluli, and Anglo-American white middle class communities. The authors identified differences in how members of these societies organized interactions with children and how they conceptualized the child and its social and linguistic develop-ment. They proposed that caregivers' communicative behaviors were organized by and expressive of values and beliefs held by members of their social group. Thus, interactions between children and care-givers could be understood as cultural phenomena embedded in the larger systems of cultural meaning and social order of the society into which the child is being socialized. Before long, this perspective was brought to bear on second and for-eign language education. It should be noted that the distinction between second language (a nonnative language used in the speaker/learner's daily life) and foreign language (a language studied by the speaker/ learner in a formal instructional setting removed from the target lan-guage community) is a problematic one. This may be particularly true in postcolonial, multilingual contexts, where many people rarely use the " official " language outside the classroom and where the boundaries between languages are often not clear. Thus, in the following discus-sion I use the term Lx to refer to any language other than the learner's native language (cf. Pavlenko, 2006). Poole (1992) studied interactions in adult ESL classes in the USA, where she found several discourse features that resembled those of white middle-class American (WMCA) child–caregiver interactions. She argued that these features encoded and communicated cultural mes-sages and norms of expert–novice interaction, including a preference for expert accommodation of novice incompetence and a disprefer-ence for displays of asymmetry. Poole observed that the role of teacher is " culturally constrained and motivated " (p. 611), making efforts to change classroom discourse patterns or scripts difficult because these patterns are tied to cultural norms and the individual's identity as culture member. Duff (1993, 1995) examined foreign language classroom interaction in three experimental dual-language (Hungarian–English) secondary schools in Hungary. Focusing her analysis on a traditional genre of oral assessment known as felelés (" recitation "), she found that political and social changes in post-communist Hungary were reflected and enacted in the transformation of classroom discourse patterns in the English-medium sections of these innovative schools. Associated with 176