Researching Language Socialization

Abstract

Language socialization research is concerned with the ways in which children or other novices (of any age) acquire language as well as the knowledge, skills, orientations, and practices that enable them to participate in the social life of a particular community. The language socialization approach is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on insights and methods from anthropology, sociology, linguistics, psychology, education, and allied fields. Four key methodological features are essential to language socialization research: a longitudinal study design; field-based collection and analysis of a substantial corpus of naturalistic audio and/or audio-video data; a holistic, theoretically informed ethnographic perspective; and attention to both micro and macro levels of analysis, as well as to linkages between them. This integrated, multidisciplinary methodological approach has yielded important findings concerning such matters as the agency of learners, the effects of continuities and disjunctures between home- and classroom-based practices, and the sociocultural dynamics of language shift and other far-reaching processes of transformation and change.