In a globalizing world, there are new spaces for language socialization to take place, among which transnational adoption has become more visible in popular culture due to recent mass media attention. However, not much has been said about how second language (L2) socialization occurs in transactional adoption and what cultural, linguistic, and social issues are at stake for both parents and adoptees.
Fogle addresses these issues by analyzing naturalistic data of everyday interactions in three middle-class families in the United States who adopted Russian children above the age of 4. In this multiple case study, “each family is considered discretely within its context…” (p. 52), and the analysis of the 8-month videotape recordings provides an emic perspective on L2 socialization in transnational adoption. Data collection consists of two different types of recordings: in-home interactions and interviews with participants in their own homes. Interviews were mainly ethnographic in nature, although a modified version of simulated recall methodology was also used in which participants were asked to reflect and report on their past actions or behaviors. In this respect, it is particularly interesting to note that the researcher also reflects on the data collection protocol and discusses how working with sensitive populations, as Fogle puts it, requires a very careful technique for the collection and handling of data.
The analysis focuses on three important aspects of daily interactions. The first aspect is narration, which is addressed from a discursive and a linguistic perspective. The detailed account of mealtime conversations in one of the families helps the reader understand the role of narrative socialization in creating meaning out of daily events and in providing coherence among them. In particular, the author examines two types of events: narrative routines (imposed by the father) and spontaneous narratives. Narrative routines revolve around daily activities and give way to an interactive negotiation in which children sometimes resist their assigned roles. This type of resistance, the author claims, “is not often reported in studies of second language socialization where resistance is more likely documented as a reason or explanation for failure to acquire certain linguistic features” (p. 98). Spontaneous narratives, on the contrary, refer to narrations about the distant past (their lives before the adoption) and are therefore fundamental in the development of L2 identities.
The second aspect of the analysis is adoptees’ agency in the construction of their communicative environment. This is particularly relevant to understanding why language socialization is bidirectional and how children become actual agents in this process. The author studies the way in which two children became agents by using an interactional strategy: asking what-questions to recruit parental assistance. Although previous literature analyzed these what-questions in parent-child reading interactions, Fogle reveals that other types of family interactions also involve the use of these questions to demand a metalinguistic explanation (such as the categorization, definition, or explanation of a concept).
The third aspect addressed in the book is language choice. The author studies adoptees’ agency in negotiating and choosing which language (English or Russian) they will use in family activities. However, language choice is not addressed as a compensatory strategy to make up for lack of knowledge of the L2 but as a vital factor in the social process of becoming a member of the family. For this reason, Fogle pays special attention to the value that participants attach to each language in its context of use: For some family members speaking English can be seen as a symbol of belonging to the new family, and speaking Russian can be seen as detrimental to the development of their competence in the target language. This family ideology, together with purist attitudes against mixing both languages in daily use, helps to shape parent-sibling and sibling-sibling power relations.
Fogle’s findings provide substantial insight for looking into the many factors that shape L2 socialization and for (re)considering the complex nature of socialization agency. Although the study focuses on transnational adoption, the analysis is also relevant for the study of other language socialization settings. For this reason, the book may be of interest for a broad audience in the field of SLA.
