Language Socialization

Relevance to Issues of Diversity in Education

While language socialization has provided a framework for understanding processes that lead to social and cultural reproduction, it also illuminates processes that can lead to transformation and change as well as acts of rejection and refusal to participate in the socializing process. For example, language socialization research has demonstrated multiple ways of social reproduction in schooling through curricula, transmission of sanctioned knowledge, and preferred forms of demeanor. These are not always appropriated and enacted, so students can become variously labeled as outside the norm and even as problems. Language socialization studies have also shown how students and [Page 1336]teachers can reconfigure norms and produce socialization outcomes that lead to other forms of learning. In this way, the socialization process is never entirely reproductive; moreover, the responses to socialization are not uniform.

Language socialization offers a way to understand how language ideologies construct and frame who participates as well as when and how to participate. In this way, language ideologies are inextricably tied to power and constructions of difference. Educational laws, policies, and curricula transmit and reproduce institutional ideologies that are reflective of a history of sanctioned practices. Practices across school and community do not always reflect ideological points of view that uphold shared norms. When competing ideologies collide in school, as when a child's home language and literacy practices are different from school expectations, the school often enforces the institutional ideology at the risk of devaluing the linguistic and cultural practices of the home. This is often the case in situations where the school upholds monolingualism while the student population might be bilingual.

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