Scholars of nationalism have long considered universal education and the spread of literacy as primary mechanisms for cultural and linguistic homogenization, thus creating the social conditions that make it possible for individuals to identify themselves as members of the imagined community (Anderson, Reference Anderson1991, p. 6) of the nation (e.g., Gellner, Reference Gellner1983; Weber, Reference Weber1976). Public education has also been identified as a crucial site for acculturating new immigrants (e.g. Olneck, Reference Olneck, Banks and McGee2004) and instilling democratic values (e.g., Dewey, 1916/Reference Dewey1966; Levinson, Reference Levinson2005), and popular recognition of the role of education in legitimating cultural identity and developing national consciousness has sometimes turned schools into sites of struggle among competing ethnolinguistic and national groups (e.g., Langman, Reference Langman2002).
However, in recent years traditional assimilationist models of civic education have been challenged by the competing values of multiculturalism, while social forces such as transborder labor migration, globalization, and mass communication have blurred the boundaries between nations and national cultures, thus highlighting the limitations of the exclusionary or essentialist conceptualizations of national identity often promoted by schooling (e.g., Mitchell, Reference Mitchell2001). Drawing from a corpus of studies appearing over the last 10 years, this survey will review the contributions of a language socialization approach to understandings of the role of schooling in the formation and transformation of national political identities in the age of globalization. It will it will explore five broad and sometimes overlapping themes: (a) socialization into the national language, (b) socialization of immigrants, (c) socialization into new forms of national identity, (d) socialization of minority political identities within nation-states, and (e) socialization and transnational identities. The survey will conclude with a review of the strengths of a language socialization approach to the study of these issues as well as suggested directions for future research.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
Language Socialization and Political Identities
Language socialization research is concerned with the process through which individuals become “culturally intelligible subjects” (Kulick & Schieffelin, Reference Kulick, Schieffelin and Duranti2004, p. 351); that is, how they acquire the ways of speaking, acting, and being in the world that are recognized as legitimate within a community (or communities) of practice. Part of this process involves developing an awareness of the range of subject positions (i.e., identities) that one is expected or allowed to take up and how these are performed in the course of everyday interaction. As novices interact with other community members in various activities, they are socialized into the social acts (i.e., socially recognized goal-directed verbal behavior) and stances (i.e., a verbal display of a socially recognized perspective or attitude) that are conventionally associated with particular social identities within the community and into the language ideologies that imbue these acts and stances with social meaning (Ochs, Reference Ochs, Duranti and Godwin1992, Reference Ochs1993, Reference Ochs, Gumperz and Levinson1996, Reference Ochs and Kramsch2002). They in turn may use these acts, stances, and ideologies as resources for enacting their own roles, relationships, and group memberships and for interpreting and categorizing the actions of others.
The studies to be reviewed here examine schools as sites for socialization into the language behaviors and language ideologies associated with membership in the imagined community called the nation or its political manifestation, the nation-state. For social scientists, the term nation refers to a form of social organization whose precise definition remains elusive, but which is generally understood to be a community based on a (supposedly) shared language and culture (e.g., Anderson, Reference Anderson1991, Gellner, Reference Gellner1983). While sometimes overlapping with ethnic affiliation, national identity is generally distinguished from ethnic or cultural identity in that it is associated with claims for political autonomy or independence.Footnote 1 A variety of terms have been used to refer to this form of identification, reflecting the various ways in which the relationship between individuals and national communities may be constructed. For example, national identity carries with it assumptions of a deeply felt, internalized identification with the nation, while the more legalistic citizenship signifies a set of rights and obligations conferred through community membership. For purposes of this review, the term political identity will be employed to encompass a range of such relationships as well as alternative forms of political identification, such as transnationalism, which reference membership in multiple national communities.
Setting the Parameters
A primary characteristic of language socialization research is its focus on everyday language use as the central locus for cultural production, reproduction, and transformation. Its aim is not simply to describe the practices of a particular community (as is the case with ethnography more generally), but to trace the processes through which novices become competent in these practices and are accepted as members (or, conversely, how they fail to become competent and are not accepted as members). This emphasis on developmental processes does not limit language socialization research to its traditional focus on young children; the approach has always emphasized that socialization occurs across the life span (e.g., Schieffelin & Ochs, Reference Schieffelin and Ochs1986) and has been productively applied to examine the experiences of adolescents and adults who are entering new or evolving communities of practice (see Garrett & Baquedano-López, Reference Garrett and Baquedano-López2002). Nor does it presume an unproblematic transmission of cultural knowledge from expert to novice, but it considers socialization as something achieved (or resisted) through negotiation in the context of everyday interaction (Kulick & Schieffelin, Reference Kulick, Schieffelin and Duranti2004; Ochs, Reference Ochs1988; Schieffelin, Reference Schieffelin1990).
The question of what constitutes a language socialization study has engendered considerable discussion in recent years as the approach has expanded beyond its origins and been taken up by researchers in a variety of disciplines (e.g., Baquedano-López & Kattan, Reference Baquedano-López, Kattan, Auer and Wei2007; Bayley & Schecter, Reference Bayley and Schecter2003; Garrett, Reference Garrett and Brown2006; Kulick & Schieffelin, Reference Kulick, Schieffelin and Duranti2004). According to Kulick and Schieffelin, a language socialization study must be ethnographic and longitudinal, and it must “demonstrate the acquisition (or not) of particular linguistic and cultural practices over time and across contexts” (p. 350). Garrett proposed that language socialization research (a) be longitudinal and ethnographic, (b) incorporate analysis of audio or video recorded interaction, and (c) attend to both macro- and micro-levels of analysis. He further argued that it is not possible to ignore one or more of these areas and still be counted as language socialization research. However, as Baquedano-López and Kattan have noted, the term language socialization may be used to refer not only to a theoretical and methodological approach but also to a research focus; that is, a study that examines the role of language in the process of socialization may be called a language socialization study even though it may not necessarily adhere to the methodology just delineated.
For purposes of this survey, a language socialization study will be understood to be one that (a) focuses on the process of becoming national as opposed to the practices of being national, (b) incorporates analysis of the language use and language ideologies of everyday classroom practices as they relate to this process, and (c) situates classroom practices within a larger sociopolitical context. While the majority of studies to be reviewed here explicitly evoke language socialization as the operating theoretical framework, the survey will also take selective note of other relevant ethnographic research that is broadly consistent with the aims of the approach.
LANGUAGE AND NATION: SOCIALIZATION INTO THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE
Among the behaviors deemed to constitute identities as members of a national community, speaking the national language (or languages)Footnote 2 is arguably the most powerful, such that failure to do so may call into question an individual's political loyalties or rights to community membership (e.g., Woolard & Schieffelin, Reference Woolard and Schieffelin1994, p. 61). The past decade has seen an increasing number of language socialization studies conducted in multilingual settings in which the national language differs from what is spoken in the local community, a number of which have examined how children are socialized into speaking the national language in school (Augsburger, Reference Augsburger2004; Fellin, Reference Fellin2001; Howard, Reference Howard2003, Reference Howard2004, Reference Howard2009; Moore, Reference Moore2004, Reference Moore2006; Paugh Reference Paugh2001, Reference Paugh2005). While formation of political identities has not been the primary focus of this research, it has nevertheless revealed the complex and often subtle ways that school language practices contribute to the construction of associations linking different languages and language varieties to various social identities, values, and group memberships, with consequences for patterns of civic or cultural identification.
Howard's (Reference Howard2003, Reference Howard2004, Reference Howard2009) research in a village in northern Thailand examined how children were being socialized into showing respect across the contexts of home, Buddhist temple, and school. In the school setting, Howard found that showing respect was represented as an essential feature of being Thai, a form of national identification encompassing the range of diverse cultural, ethnic, and linguistic groups that constitute modern Thailand. She further showed how kindergartners were being socialized into displaying respect in the classroom through the medium of the national language, Standard Thai, which since the late 19th century has served as an emblem of a unified Thai national identity, rather than in the local vernacular Kam Muang. For example, although children were free to speak Kam Muang in class (on the assumption that they were “not yet ready to receive” [Howard, Reference Howard2003, p. 327] Standard Thai), teachers insisted on use of Standard Thai politeness particles to show respect to teachers during certain classroom activities. Howard concluded that through such practices children were not only being socialized into appropriate forms of showing respect but also into language ideologies positioning Standard Thai as the language through which identities as Thai citizens were to be performed.
In her study of language socialization in Q'uranic and public schools in Cameroon, Moore (Reference Moore2004, Reference Moore2006) compared how rote learning practices, or guided repetition, served different socialization goals in these two settings. In Cameroon, public education has been charged with the goal of fostering a Cameroonian identity and a modern understanding of the world in opposition to so-called traditional or tribal forms of identification. Part of this process involves socializing children into speaking the national language, French, and the primary focus of education in the primary grades is to develop basic competence in the language by having the children listen to, memorize, and perform scripted role plays. However, Moore noted that the guided repetition routines that she observed in French language classrooms served other social goals as well by, for example, providing models of appropriate language behavior and encouraging children to identify with the French-speaking Cameroonians portrayed in the role plays. Through participation in these guided repetition routines, children took on the ways of speaking and acting that were congruent with idealized identities as members of the Cameroonian nation-state.
Paugh's (Reference Paugh2001, Reference Paugh2005) research in Dominica describes how Patwa, a once-disdained French-based creole spoken in rural areas, has been seized upon by some intellectuals as a symbol of the nation's distinct cultural identity and become the focus of revitalization efforts. Nevertheless, the official national language (and the language of education, business, and the urban elite) is English. Paugh's analysis of classroom languages practices demonstrated how children's use of Patwa was corrected to English and an English-only policy remained in force, with the exception of Creole Day, when everyone was supposed to speak the vernacular as part of an islandwide cultural celebration. Paugh concluded that such practices were reinforcing language ideologies through which English had come to index membership in the national (and international) community beyond the village as well as desirable social values such as modernity and progress, thus contributing to an ongoing process of language shift to English. On the other hand, attempts to revalue Patwa and to position it as an emblem of an imagined Dominican identity were largely rejected by villagers, who associated the language with a purely local (and often stigmatized) identity. This dichotomy was also reflected in children's code choices during pretend play (Paugh, Reference Paugh2005), as children enacted roles such as schoolteacher in English, while switching to Patwa for roles such as farmer.
SOCIALIZATION OF IMMIGRANTS
Socialization of New Citizens
While the discourses of multiculturalism have largely replaced the melting pot metaphor in the rhetoric surrounding education of immigrants, recent ethnographic research has revealed that ideologies of assimilation still hold sway in many classrooms. For example, in their critical ethnography of an elementary school coping with a recent influx of Spanish-speaking immigrant children, Garza and Crawford (Reference Garza and Crawford2005) explored the “contradictory missions of affirming diversity and promoting assimilation” (p. 600) that arose as the school sought to maintain high standardized test scores by bringing immigrant children up to grade-level performance standards as quickly as possible. Integrating classroom observations and interviews with teachers and school administrators, the authors argued that despite the school's stated intent to honor cultural diversity, school policies and classroom practices effectively marginalized Spanish-speaking children and defined academic success and community membership in terms of English language proficiency, thus promoting an agenda of linguistic assimilation. They further argued that through these practices, immigrant children were socialized into an ideology of hegemonic multiculturalism, defined as the appropriation of the rhetoric of multiculturalism to obscure an underlying assimilationist agenda.
Resnik, Sabar, and Shapira (Reference Resnik, Sabar and Shapira2001) explored similar issues in Israel, another country where ideologies of assimilation (or what Israelis call klitat aliyah, “absorption of immigrants”) have long dominated. In this multiple case study of fourth- to eighth-grade immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the authors identified a tension between two models of absorption: the assimilationist model, in which immigrants were expected to exchange their former cultural practices and political identification for Israeli ones, and the integration model, which allowed for a multicultural society and sought to gradually adapt newcomers to local cultural practices without the expectation that they would completely abandon their cultural identities. Similar to Garza and Crawford (Reference Garza and Crawford2005), Resnik et al. found that teachers’ stated support for an integration model contrasted with school and classroom practices that ignored the immigrants’ Russian cultural backgrounds and sought to socialize them into Israeli norms. However, they also found that the immigrant students resisted this assimilation, in part because they viewed Russian culture as equal to or, in some cases, superior to that of Israel. This situation led to what the authors called a semipermeable enclave model of absorption in which immigrant students acquired sufficient language and social skills to function in Israeli society yet remained culturally isolated.
A closely related study is Golden's (Reference Golden2001) ethnographic research in an ulpan (Hebrew class) for adult immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union. While Golden's stated focus is on what the socialization process reveals about Israeli concepts of national identity rather than on the outcomes of this process, her analysis of teacher-student interactions provided a thought-provoking depiction of a second language classroom as a site for acculturation. Golden's major claim is that classroom practices treated the students (well-educated adults) like children, reflecting assumptions that newcomers to Israel should be emptied of their past memories and experiences and reborn into new identities. In addition, while the teacher repeatedly emphasized that students, as members of a democratic society, had the freedom to express their own opinions, on certain political or cultural matters they were expected to speak as Israelis and to adopt an appropriate Israeli perspective. Students, however, were resistant to this all-encompassing ethnonational view of Israeli citizenship; while acknowledging proficiency in Hebrew as necessary for full participation in Israeli society, they claimed the right to remain culturally Russian.
Also worthy of note is Griswold's (Reference Griswold2007) recent dissertation research examining language socialization in a citizenship class in southern California. Although language instruction was not an official component of the class, Griswold found that the teacher frequently, albeit selectively, corrected students’ linguistic errors. Her detailed analysis of classroom correction routines demonstrated how students were being socialized into an understanding of the centrality of English language competence in performing an identity as a (potential) American citizen and into using the language to demonstrate knowledge of American history and government in ways congruent with community practices (e.g., describing the colors of the flag as “red, white, and blue” rather than “blue, red, and white”). However, in line with the stated mission of the class to prepare students for their upcoming naturalization interviews, the definition of citizenship being coconstructed through these interactions reflected the very narrow concerns of the naturalization test (see Kunan, Reference Kunan2009). That is, rather than socializing students into the acts and stances associated with being American citizens, the class was socializing them into the acts and stances associated with being successful applicants for American citizenship.
Socialization into Immigrant Identities in the Classroom
Another issue that has emerged in several recent second language socialization studies concerns how immigrant students are identified in the classroom and how they take up or contest these ascribed identities (Duff, Reference Duff2002; García Sánchez, Reference García Sánchez2009; Harklau, Reference Harklau2000, Reference Harklau, Bayley and Schecter2003; Talmy, Reference Talmy2008, Reference Talmy2009a, Reference Talmy, Reyes and Lo2009b). A common finding of this work is that rather than socializing students into membership in a national community, classroom practices may deny them such membership by identifying them as outsiders, thus socializing both immigrant students and their local classmates into exclusionary notions of national identity.
Duff's (Reference Duff2002) study in a high school social studies class in Canada illustrates the challenges and contradictions inherent in attempts to balance two competing values: respect for cultural diversity and inclusion. In an effort to socialize her immigrant students into participation in the valued classroom discourse practice of whole-class discussions, the teacher frequently called on them to speak as representatives of what was characterized as “their culture” and to provide an alternative to the Canadian perspectives of other students. The minimal answers (or silence) given in response to these elicitations were interpreted as evidence of these students’ resistance to these ascribed identities as Others as well as a reluctance to further mark their difference through their nonnative English. Yet their silence also isolated and stigmatized them in the eyes of the other students. Duff concluded that through these practices teacher and students were co-constructing difference that worked against achievement of a classroom environment of respect and inclusion.
Both Harklau (Reference Harklau2000, Reference Harklau, Bayley and Schecter2003) and Talmy (Reference Talmy2008, Reference Talmy2009a, Reference Talmy, Reyes and Lo2009b) have examined how identities as English as a second language (ESL) students were constructed within classrooms and how these identities positioned students relative to local and national communities. Harklau's ethnographic case study following the progress of four immigrant students in the United States as they transitioned from high school to community college focused on the contrasting representations—defined as “the images, archetypes, or even stereotypes of identity” (Reference Harklau2000, p. 37)—assigned to these students in these two settings. In high school, they were what Harklau (Reference Harklau, Bayley and Schecter2003, p. 87) referred to as “Ellis Island immigrants”, hard-working strivers who overcame challenges to succeed in America. This representation, which recognized them as members (albeit peripheral members) of the national community and gave them a place in a traditional American national story, was readily taken up and performed by the students through practices such as writing inspirational essays on their immigration experience. However, these same students resisted the representations imposed upon them in community college ESL classes, where they were included among an undifferentiated group of international students who required socialization into American cultural and academic practices (despite the fact that the immigrant students were long-term residents with considerable cultural knowledge) and who were expected to write about “their” cultures (about which they had few memories and limited experience). These essentializing representations positioned these students as foreigners and denied the heterogeneity of their experiences and their own self-identification as legitimate members of the American community in which they had spent much of their lives.
Talmy's research in a high school ESL class in Hawai'i (Reference Talmy2008, Reference Talmy2009a, Reference Talmy, Reyes and Lo2009b) similarly described the resistance of those whom he called oldtimer students (i.e., long-term residents) to the stigmatized ESL identity assigned to them by the school that represented them as newly arrived Others who were culturally and linguistically deficient. However, in this case resistance took the form of construction of an alternative form of identification that Talmy labeled Local ESL, which was framed around the cultural and social practices of an established Local community in Hawai'i made up of Hawai'ian-born Asians and Pacific Islanders. Through a variety of practices, including not doing homework, disengaging from class activities, and speaking Hawai'i Pidgin rather than Standard English, these students disaffiliated themselves from both the school-sanctioned good ESL student identity and the newcomer ESL students and instead claimed full membership in a locally defined community of practice. At the same time, however, Talmy noted that by ensuring poor academic outcomes, these same practices served to keep these students in the very ESL classes they disdained.
García Sánchez (Reference García Sánchez2009) took up this issue from a European perspective in her dissertation on language socialization of Moroccan immigrant children in Spain. The integration of Moroccan immigrants into Spanish society has been complicated by perceptions that they are both a threat to Spanish identity (e.g., they are non-Christians with radically different cultural practices) and to national security (through associations with the terrorist bombings in Madrid in 2004 as well as historical associations with the Moors who once controlled Spanish territory). García Sánchez's observations in a middle school classroom revealed how these negative perceptions impacted classroom interaction even in a school environment in which tolerance and inclusion were promoted and racial slurs and harassment were punished. For example, local Spanish children frequently singled out the Moroccan immigrant children as targets for tattle-taling (accusar) and directives that characterized their behavior as outside the norms of acceptability, a characterization with which other local students as well as teachers often aligned. Moreover, school practices meant to be inclusive, such as Interculturality Day, emphasized differences rather than commonalities and implied that culture was something exotic and alien that only minority children had. García Sánchez concluded that by highlighting the ways in which Moroccan students failed to conform to expected Spanish cultural norms and behaviors, these practices were socializing Moroccan students into marginalized identities as Others.
REIMAGINING THE NATION: SOCIALIZATION INTO NEW FORMS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
Alterations in the political landscape brought about by events such as the collapse of the Soviet Union or shifting patterns of immigration can lead to changes in the composition of a national community and in how membership in that community is defined. Two recent language socialization studies conducted in post–Cold War Europe have examined the evolving conceptualizations of national identity being constructed in high school history classes in postunification Berlin (Vogel, Reference Vogel, Backman and Sakalauskaite2008, Vogel-Langer, Reference Vogel-Langer2008) and fifth-grade language and literature classrooms in Ukraine (Friedman, Reference Friedman2006, Reference Friedman2010).
One of the major findings of Vogel-Langer's (Reference Vogel-Langer2008) study was the fact that an ostensibly new unified German national identity was in fact grounded in the practices and ideologies of the politically dominant group, the former West Germans. For example, in classrooms in the former East Berlin, routines such as greeting sequences, which in the preunification period had been characterized by a high degree of formality and strict teacher control, had been relaxed or had disappeared altogether in accordance with the classroom norms and democratic values associated with the former West Germany. Students were also increasingly likely to associate a unified German identity with speaking Standard German in accordance with dominant West German language ideologies, while the local Berlin dialect had come to index an undesirable East German identity. Interestingly, however, Vogel-Langer found that these shifts in orientation were primarily driven by students, not teachers. East German teachers did not problematize or correct students’ use of Berlin dialect in class, and the teachers sometimes used it themselves. Moreover, while East German teachers occasionally attempted to make relevant students’ identities as East Germans through pronoun usage linking them to a supposedly shared East German past, students tended to resist such identification (Vogel, Reference Vogel, Backman and Sakalauskaite2008). Similar to the situation described by Duff (Reference Duff1995, Reference Duff, Bailey and Nunan1996) in her language socialization study of English immersion high school classrooms in postcommunist Hungary, teachers and students in these Berlin classrooms were engaged in a process of bidirectional socialization (Ochs, Reference Ochs1988) that inverted the expected expert-novice relationship, a phenomenon that may be characteristic of societies in the midst of rapid political and social transformation.
A similar process of national reimagining is occurring in Ukraine (Friedman, Reference Friedman2006, Reference Friedman2010), where the term Ukrainian, which once referred to an ethnic category with membership determined by descent, is being redefined as a civic category based on citizenship, encompassing all of the country's multiethnic and multilingual population. Nevertheless, the definition of Ukrainian being co-constructed in the classroom drew heavily upon traditional emblems of Ukrainian ethnolinguistic identity, in particular, the Ukrainian language, which has long been subordinate to Russian. In addition to teaching the mechanics of good grammar and spelling, teachers in the two classrooms engaged students in a variety of activities designed to socialize them into language ideologies that positioned Ukrainian as a pure and beautiful language and part of the children's linguistic and cultural heritage, even though not all of them were ethnic Ukrainians or spoke the language at home. Of particular significance were error correction routines that targeted children's mixing of Ukrainian and Russian, a common practice among Ukrainian-Russian bilinguals that is nevertheless widely condemned as a relic of past linguistic oppression and an impediment to establishment of Ukrainian as a national language distinct from Russian (Friedman, Reference Friedman2010). In addition, through activities such as recitation of poetry or whole-class discussions about what makes language beautiful, teachers encouraged children to evaluate language and language usage based on aesthetic criteria. Through their participation in such activities and routines, children were socialized into the ways of speaking and valuing language in ways congruent with dominant Ukrainian language ideologies and into speaking the language correctly and beautifully as a sign of pride in their language and nation.
Outside of a European context, Sandel (Reference Sandel2003) used interviews with three generations of Taiwanese to explore the impact of evolving notions of language and national identity on school and home language socialization practices in Taiwan. In the past, government policy had strictly prohibited use of any language other than the national language (Mandarin Chinese) in schools as part of its promotion of a Chinese national identity, leading to large-scale language shift away from local vernaculars such as Tai-gi (Taiwanese) and Hakka. However, the growing political power of the local Taiwanese population (i.e., residents other than those descended from post-1949 immigrants from Mainland China), resulted in a revaluation of these vernaculars and to school policies promoting Mandarin-vernacular bilingualism in the 1990s. Sandel's analysis suggested that these macro-level shifts were accompanied by a growing tendency among his respondents to promote their children's proficiency in the vernacular through home socialization practices, as well as a trend toward assertion of a distinct Taiwanese identity indexed through that vernacular. While the study's reliance on interviews rather than actual observations or recordings of caregiver–child interaction somewhat limits the claims it can make regarding the ultimate effect of school language policies on home socialization practices, it nevertheless offers an intriguing glimpse of the interconnections between changing attitudes toward use of local vernaculars in schools and the emergence of alternative forms of political identification.
Another country in which definitions of citizenship are being redefined is Australia, where an influx of immigrants from Asia over the past two decades is challenging traditional exclusionist notions of national identity that limited the designation Australian to descendents of white Europeans. Lotherington (Reference Lotherington, Bayley and Schecter2003) examined this process through an analysis of the multiple literacy practices of immigrant high school students from Southeast Asia whose school had recently instituted courses in Khmer and Vietnamese literacy. Although such classes might be seen as legitimating non-English languages within the educational system and promoting a more multicultural vision of Australia, Lotherington found that the school still defined literacy as English language literacy, with literacy in other languages positioned as an optional extra; that is, multicultural competence had not yet been incorporated into core understandings of what it means to be Australian. While these results are intriguing, the published study lacks the detailed analysis of literacy-focused interactions in either the school or the community that would clarify how such practices were socializing students into identification as members or outsiders in the Australian national community.
NATIONS WITHIN NATIONS: SOCIALIZATION OF MINORITY POLITICAL IDENTITIES WITHIN THE NATION-STATE
While the belief that political units are ideally linguistically and culturally homogeneous remains widespread (e.g., Blommaert & Verschueren, Reference Blommaert, Verschueren, Schieffelin, Woodward and Kroskrity1998), the presence of ethnolinguistically defined nations within larger nation-states is a common phenomenon, especially in Europe. In settings in which control of the educational system has been decentralized, it becomes possible for locally controlled minority language schools or other institutions to promote a sense of ethnonational identification alongside, or in opposition to, identification with the nation-state.
Jaffe's (Reference Jaffe1993, Reference Jaffe1996, Reference Jaffe1999, Reference Jaffe2003) long-term ethnographic research on Corsica has provided much insight into how the language ideologies of nationalist political movements can shape everyday language use and language attitudes. Her micro-level analysis of literacy instruction in a bilingual (Corsican-French) classroom (2003) described a situation in which a desire to impart Corsican language literacy skills existed alongside a desire to promote the language as an emblem of cultural and national identity. However, due to language shift, few of the children in this classroom had a high level of Corsican language proficiency, a fact that the teacher wanted to avoid calling attention to, as it would call into question the children's right to claim a linguistically defined Corsican identity. The resulting Corsican literacy practices, which included collaborative construction of texts (an activity dominated by a few linguistically proficient students) and recall and recitation of previously constructed texts, as well as the teacher's use of the first person plural (e.g., what “we” wrote) allowed for varied levels of student participation and transferred “symbolic ownership and competence” (p. 218) of the text and the language to all of the children, thus allowing (and encouraging) them to identify as Corsican.
In a study conducted in high schools in the Basque country of Spain, Echeverria (Reference Echeverria2003) explored the dichotomy between ideologies of language and national identity promoted through Basque-medium schooling and more nuanced forms of identification expressed by students. Drawing primarily on analysis of textbooks along with a limited consideration of classroom talk, Echeverria found that teachers were attempting to socialize students into ideologies that associated Basque identity with speaking Basque. However, interviews with students revealed alternative ways of conceptualizing a Basque identity, such as being born in the Basque country, as well as claims of a hybrid Basque-Spanish identity. These results raise important questions about making direct connections between the goals and outcomes of school socialization, although further analysis of classroom interactions, in particular, the implicit (as well as explicit) ways that teachers used classroom practices to link Basque identity to speaking Basque and students’ responses to such linkages, would be informative.
LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION INTO TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES
As evidenced from this survey, educational institutions have tended to presume that the community into which newcomers are to be socialized coincides with the boundaries of a nation or nation-state. However, the increasing flow of people, commodities, and ideas across national borders that has characterized recent history has been accompanied by a shift in focus among social scientists from conventional notions of a territorially defined community of shared cultural norms to the study of borderlands and transnationalism. While the term borderlands originally referred to the territory on either side of the Mexican–U.S. border and the social practices and forms of cultural and political identification that metaphorically crossed this border, more recently it has also been used to refer to other border areas of the world (Alvarez, Reference Alvarez1995). The related concept of transnationalism refers to “processes that are anchored in and transcend one or more nation-states” (Kearney, Reference Kearney1995, p. 548). The essence of both concepts is the assumption that the boundaries of community may extend across national borders and that these communities may partake of multiple cultural and linguistic practices.
What distinguishes research on borderlands and transnationalism from that on heritage language or cultural maintenance within immigrant communities (see He, this issue) is not so much the phenomenon being studied as the analytical lens through which it is being viewed. In other words, rather than asking how immigrant children are socialized into a cultural identity as (for example) Mexican, research on borderlands or transnationalism seeks to understand how supposedly bounded and discrete national identities are blended and transformed into new forms of identification. With this in mind, the survey that follows will be limited to those studies in which the concept of borderlands or transnationalism has been explicitly evoked by the researcher as an analytical framework.
For the most part, language socialization research in the borderlands has focused on settings outside of public education, although it has implications for understandings of identity as they are formulated within classrooms. The most extensive studies thus far are González's (Reference González2001) thoughtful account focusing on Mexican-origin mothers and children in Tucson and Schecter and Bayley's (Reference Schecter and Bayley2002) multiple case study of Mexican-descent families in California and Texas. While both studies focused primarily on caregiver–child socialization in the home and its effect on language and cultural identity maintenance, González also drew connections and contrasts between the multilayered forms of identification being socialized through these home interactional practices and the bounded and discrete American and Mexican identities that characterized schooling on both sides of the border. In particular, she proposed that home language practices, such as use of both English and Spanish and the adoption of school discursive practices during homework sessions, aimed to socialize children into a transformed Mexican identity that honored and preserved the children's cultural roots while at the same time incorporating certain practices of the dominant American society in which they lived.
Baquedano-López's (Reference Baquedano-López and Duranti2001) study of language socialization and transnational identities examined narrative practices during doctrina (catechism) classes in a Catholic parish in Los Angeles with a large number of Mexican immigrants. Her analysis focused on the process through which the teacher and students collaboratively retold a version of the narrative of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, which tells the story of a Mexican Indian peasant who had a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1531. Using a variety of strategies, such as highlighting the children's Mexican origins and describing the Virgin as being “a little dark (morenita) like us” (p. 353), the teacher engaged the children in co-constructing an inclusive community of Mexicans that transcended both time and space and linked the children's current lived experience as immigrants in Los Angeles to a long-ago event in Mexico.
The Internet has also been proposed as site for both the maintenance of ethnic, national, and linguistic identities by diasporic communities across national borders as well as the creation of new forms of transnational identification (see Lam, Reference Lam, Duff and Hornberger2008). Lam's work on second language socialization and identity formation in virtual communities (Reference Lam2003, Reference Lam2004) has been at the forefront of language socialization research in this area. Her case study of second language and literacy socialization of two Chinese immigrant teenage girls (2004) contrasted the practices in which these girls participated during school ESL classes with those in a bilingual Chinese-English chatroom based in Hong Kong that both girls frequented. Participation in this online community, whose members were primarily Chinese emigrants in a variety of countries along with bilingual Hong Kong Chinese, required proficiency in hybrid language practices involving code switching between Cantonese-influenced English and romanized Cantonese (i.e., Cantonese written in Latin letters). Lam argued that participation in these hybrid language practices was socializing the girls into identities as “bilingual Chinese emigrants” (p. 59) distinct from both English-speaking (Chinese) Americans and Cantonese-speaking Chinese and was providing alternative identities as English speakers that challenged the native-speaker models promoted through the school.
CONCLUSION
The language socialization research surveyed here is part of a growing body of ethnographic work that has enriched understandings of the role of everyday classroom practices in large-scale political projects such as acculturation and nation building. The findings that have emerged thus far have challenged assumptions of a simple or straightforward process of school-directed identity formation and revealed the complexities and contradictions inherent in this process.
One finding that has emerged across multiple studies is a dichotomy between discourses of inclusion and diversity that have become the norm in education and the explicit and implicit messages being conveyed through everyday classroom interaction. The persistence of narrow, exclusionary definitions of national community surface in the way that various languages or cultural practices are positioned in the classroom and belie claims that new multicultural visions of the nation are replacing the traditional homogeneous ideal. Indeed, as many of these studies have shown, the very celebration of multiculturalism may work against inclusion of newcomers who are perceived as occupying racial or cultural categories that are incompatible with a nation's vision of itself and how national membership is conceived. In this regard it is worth remembering a core principle of school language socialization studies that classrooms do not exist in a vacuum, but are situated within a web of cultural, social, and ideological beliefs and practices that shape both classroom routines and the way that these routines are interpreted. By contextualizing classroom interaction within an environment shaped by multiple local and national political and social forces, these language socialization studies have provided insight into how such forces affect patterns of classroom socialization and how these patterns may in turn affect how individual students are identified and come to identity themselves within a national (or transnational) community.
At the same time, however, this work has also confirmed the observation that the ideal of the nation as culturally and linguistically homogeneous is at odds with the multiplicity of cultural and linguistic practices actually employed by the people within its borders (e.g., Blommaert & Verschueren, Reference Blommaert, Verschueren, Schieffelin, Woodward and Kroskrity1998). In particular, these studies have documented many instances of student resistance to essentialized or exclusionary models of political identity as well as the emergence and assertion of alternative forms of political identification, such as separate cultural identities within the nation-state or transnational identities. In so doing, they have highlighted the importance of students’ agency in their own socialization and the potential for language socialization to be a mechanism for social transformation as well as social reproduction (Garrett & Baquedano-López, Reference Garrett and Baquedano-López2002), even as they have shown the limits of such agency in engendering social or education change (e.g., Talmy, Reference Talmy2008, Reference Talmy2009a, Reference Talmy, Reyes and Lo2009b).
Nevertheless, language socialization research focusing on the formation of political identities has thus far been fairly limited, leaving much scope for future work. For example, although there is a growing body of research on second language socialization of immigrant students (e.g., see Watson-Gegeo, Reference Watson-Gegeo2004; Zuengler & Cole, Reference Zuengler, Cole and Hinkel2005), little of this work has directly taken up the issue of how language classrooms are socializing newcomers into the ideologies and subjectivities associated with speaking the national language. In addition, given that mid- to late childhood has been identified as a crucial period for identity formation (e.g., Kroger, Reference Kroger2004), the growing number of studies on the socialization of older children and adolescents (many of which have been reviewed here) represents a promising trend in language socialization research that should be further developed. Finally, more attention needs to be paid to Kulick and Schieffelin's dictum (cited at the beginning of this article) that language socialization studies should “demonstrate the acquisition (or not) of particular linguistic and cultural practices over time and across contexts” (2004, p. 350). A shortcoming of many of these studies is that, while providing a rich description of classroom interaction and its potential as a context for socialization, they often fail to provide sufficient evidence regarding how (or whether) the language learning, language ideologies, or political identities being promoted in the classroom are taken up, rejected, or modified by students. Although most of the studies reviewed here were longitudinal, there is a need for longer-term or follow-up research to investigate students’ performance of political identities over time and across contexts both inside and outside of the classroom. By drawing upon its methodological strengths, the language socialization approach has the potential to make a major contribution to the study of classrooms as sites for the construction of both belonging and difference within national communities.
