The title of this edited volume leads one to expect a timely contribution to the literature on language socialization, which has become increasingly concerned with bilingual and multilingual settings over the past decade or so. Some readers with general interests in bilingual and multilingual situations, or with special interests in education in such settings, may find this collection worthwhile. Those with a particular interest in language socialization, however, will be disappointed – and perhaps irritated to have been misled by the title. The volume's 16 chapters present a broad variety of interesting case studies, but very few among them can accurately be characterized as language socialization studies.

Before proceeding, I should make clear what I mean by “language socialization research.” My frame of reference – and ostensibly a central point of reference for this volume's editors and contributors as well – is the theoretical and methodological paradigm originally formulated by Bambi Schieffelin and Elinor Ochs (Ochs & Schieffelin 1984; Schieffelin & Ochs 1986a, 1986b). Under their ongoing influence, this body of research has continued to develop, and has been taken in important new directions by various other investigators (see Garrett & Baquedano-López 2002). As Bayley and Schecter note in their introduction, these developments include the application and adaptation of the language socialization paradigm to bilingual and multilingual settings, to later stages of the lifespan (i.e., beyond early childhood), and to contexts associated with those later stages, such as peer groups, schools, and workplaces. A collection of studies that push the boundaries of language socialization research further in these directions would therefore be a welcome addition to the current literature. Unfortunately, this volume does not push those boundaries in any significant way (although some of the chapters are interesting and informative studies in other respects).

Without being unduly rigid or dogmatic, it can be asserted that three basic elements are essential to language socialization research: an ethnographic perspective, achieved in part through sustained fieldwork; a longitudinal research design; and the collection, transcription, and analysis of a substantial corpus of naturalistic audio or audio-video data. A study that does not have these three features may be of excellent quality and a significant contribution in its own right, of course, but it does not constitute language socialization research. (See Kulick & Schieffelin 2004 in these regards.) Only two of the 16 studies in this volume can unequivocally be said to have all three elements: KimMarie Cole and Jane Zuengler's examination of identity formation in a multi-ethnic urban U.S. high school, and Agnes Weiyun He's study of Chinese heritage language classes in the United States. A third, Aurolyn Luykx's ethnographically insightful study of Aymara-Spanish bilingual households in Bolivia, may also have all three elements, but it is not entirely clear whether the author worked with naturalistic recorded data; the data presented are fragmentary, consisting mainly of isolated words and phrases interspersed with observations of a fairly general nature, and examples of situated interaction are lacking. A fourth study, María de la Piedra and Harriett D. Romo's examination of “collaborative literacy” in a Mexican immigrant household in the United States, is based on 10 hours of observation and a single videotaped literacy event, supplemented by an interview with each of the two oldest participants (mother and eldest sister); it thus has no longitudinal component, but does offer analysis of a limited amount of naturalistic data.

The remaining 12 chapters, comprising three-quarters of the book, make use of no naturalistic data whatsoever. Furthermore, only seven of these can be said to take a longitudinal approach of any kind (Lucinda Pease-Alvarez; Linda Harklau; Gordon Pon, Tara Goldstein, & Sandra R. Schecter; Donna Patrick; Juliet Langman; Jill Sinclair Bell; Sylvie Roy), and some are only marginally ethnographic. All rely heavily on interviews (Pease-Alvarez, Patricia Lamarre, Dwight Atkinson, Didi Khayatt, Christopher McAll) or some combination of interviews and observation, “ethnographic” or otherwise (Harklau, Pon et al., Patrick, Langman, Heather Lotherington, Bell, Roy). The methodological limitations of interviews – particularly interviews in which subjects are asked to give self-reports of codeswitching and other aspects of their own language use, or to articulate their language attitudes – are well known. Yet four of these studies (Pease-Alvarez, Lamarre, Lotherington, and McAll) rely heavily or exclusively on such self-reports. (McAll, in his study of language in the workplace in Montreal's aerospace industry, went so far as to ask his 20 interviewees at the end of the workday to “reconstruct” their interactions with co-workers and supervisors.) Some of the authors note that their research is ongoing (e.g., Lamarre, Atkinson), or that they are reporting on one component of a larger research project (e.g., Pon, Goldstein & Schecter); perhaps not surprisingly, some of these chapters strike one as having been written and published somewhat prematurely.

Like the volume as a whole, the editors' brief introduction, “Toward a dynamic model of language socialization,” fails to deliver on the promise of its title. It offers little more than an overview of the 16 chapters, which the editors have divided into four sections: “Language socialization at home,” “Language socialization at school,” “Language socialization in communities and peer groups,” and “Language socialization in the workplace.” These and a few other themes are pointed out, but very little is made of those themes. Most are of long standing in the language socialization literature anyway, which makes some of the editors' most prominent assertions seem poorly informed. Quoting contributor He, they assert, “A great deal of the earlier research on language socialization portrays a seamless process in which novices are conceived of as ‘passive, ready, and uniform recipients of socialization’” (p. 4). This is simply untrue: Even the earliest language socialization studies stressed the agency (and the capacity for resistance and creativity) of the child or novice, and conceptualized socialization as a two-way process. For similar reasons, the editors' assertion that the studies in this volume “provide illustrations of language socialization as a lifelong process in which those being socialized often, indeed normally, exhibit considerable agency” (6) is far from compelling. Over the past two decades, researchers have never lost sight of the fact that language socialization is indeed a lifelong process; nor have they ceased striving for just the sort of “dynamic model” (or models) that the editors allude to when they express their hope that this volume will “contribute to the development of a more dynamic model of language socialization than heretofore available” (6).

Several of the contributors make similarly unfounded and apparently uninformed assertions about previous research. According to de la Piedra and Romo, for example, “Much of the traditional literature on language socialization has been conceptualized as a one-on-one, unidirectional process and has focused on … adult caregiver-child communication” (45); they thus overlook numerous accounts of multi-party socialization and of the socializing roles of older siblings, which would have been highly relevant to their own study. Lamarre – whose study is based entirely on ten interviews of 60 to 90 minutes each, in which the subjects were asked to report their own patterns of language use and language attitudes, as well as those of family members and others – speciously asserts that language socialization research, “while generally ethnographic, tends to be limited to one or two sites and to take place within a relatively short timespan. A further weakness in existing research is that “analysis fails to take into account that definitions of situations are rarely neutral or innocent” (63). (In her final paragraph, Lamarre acknowledges that her own study as thus far constituted does have some such limitations itself, and that further research is needed.) Langman asserts that previous language socialization research “outlines a developmental process by means of which children learn to become adults by speaking like adults, in a society whose rules, norms, and values are pre-determined” (182), and cites Schieffelin and Ochs 1986b, who in fact say nothing of the kind, but rather challenge precisely the sort of perspective that Langman describes.

It is dismaying that so many of the contributors, and above all the editors, did not take care to ground themselves more firmly in the research paradigm and literature in which they claim to be working. And it is certainly regrettable that their failure to do so may cause some damage to the integrity of that body of work, insofar as this collection may be taken to be representative – or worse, to reflect the current state of the art – by readers (particularly students) who are unfamiliar with the previously existing literature.

Some chapters do offer insightful descriptions of situations that make excellent settings for language socialization research. For example, Patrick's study of motivating and constraining factors on second- and third-language acquisition among adolescents and adults in an Arctic Quebec community where Inuktitut, Cree, French, and English are in sustained contact; Atkinson's study of the changing and contested status of English as a target of mastery in a formerly elite college in South India that now serves students of diverse social and ethnolinguistic backgrounds; and Roy's study of how speakers of local vernacular varieties of French deal with the standardization of language and language practices in a bilingual telephone call service center in rural Ontario. A common theme taken up by these studies, and touched on less explicitly by a few others, is how speakers engage with changing political economies of language on multiple levels – a topic of broad contemporary relevance that can be very fruitfully explored through language socialization research.

Researchers from anthropology, applied linguistics, education, and other fields have all made substantial contributions to language socialization research, which from the outset has been resolutely interdisciplinary. It is likely that this particular volume will have the greatest appeal for an education audience: The majority of contributors have education backgrounds and/or affiliations, and 11 of the 16 studies deal with schooling, literacy, or vocational training. Furthermore, several of the chapters indicate areas in which pedagogical reforms or innovations are needed in order for speakers of minority languages, and bilingual/multilingual communities more generally, to be better served. This is surely the single greatest strength of a book that otherwise has few to recommend it.