|
Defining Language Socialization"The editors of this volume (Schieffelin and Ochs) consider socialization to be an interactional display (covert or overt) to a novice of expected ways of thinking, feeling, and acting...through their participation in social interactions, children come to internalize and gain performance competence in these sociocultural defined contexts" (Ochs, 1986, p. 2).
"Language socialization is a concept the editors take to mean both socialization through language and socialization to use language. In the perspective taken in this volume, children and other novices in society acquire tacit knowledge of principles of social order and systems of belief (ethnotheories) through exposure to and participation in language-mediated interaction. We take for granted the noncontroversial and obvious sense of this statement, that the development of intelligence and knowledge is facilitated (to an extent) by children's communication with others. Instead we pursue the nontrivial dimensions of this statement. Our approach is to examine closely the verbal interactions of infants and small children with others (older children, adults) for their sociocultural structure. Our perspective is that sociocultural information is generally encoded in the organization of conversational discourse and that discourse with children is no exception. Many formal and functional features of discourse carry sociocultural information, including phonological and morphosyntactic constructions, the lexicon, speech-act types, conversational sequencing, genres, interruptions, overlaps, gaps, and turn length. In other words, part of the meaning of grammatical and conversational structures is sociocultural. These structures are socially organized and hence carry information concerning social order (as has been demonstrated by Labov 1966, 1973). They are also culturally organized and as such expressive of local conceptions and theories about the world. Language use is then a major if not the major tool for conveying sociocultural knowledge and a powerful medium of socialization. In this sense, we invoke Sapir (Mandelbaum 1949) and Whorf (1941) and suggest that children acquire a world view as they acquire a language." (Ochs, 1986, pp. 2-3)
From: Ochs, E. (1986). Introduction. In B. B. Schieffelin & E. Ochs (Eds.), Language socialization across cultures (pp. 1-13). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Home Courses Handouts Vision Vita e-mail me
Return to top