Bayley and Schecter, eds. - Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies

Language Socialization in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies. Robert Bayley and Sandra R. Schecter, eds. Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 39. Nancy H. Hornberger and Colin Baker, series eds. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2003. 304 pp. ISBN 1853596353

BENJAMIN H. BAILEY

University of Massachusetts-Amherst

bbailey@comm.umass.edu

This ambiguously titled, edited volume includes a brief introduction and 16 case studies that address issues of language and identity, acculturation and assimilation, language ideology, language shift, and language socialization in bi- and multilingual contexts. It would make an attractive secondary text in upper-division and graduate-level courses in language education, second-language acquisition, and bilingualism, in which the goal is exposure to diverse, contemporary settings, rather than theoretical and conceptual depth.

The book is nominally divided into four sections: language socialization (1) at home, (2) at school, (3) in communities and peer groups, and (4) in the workplace. Ten of the chapters deal explicitly with school settings or literacy. Five of the studies are based on data from the United States, six from Canada, and one each from Australia, Hungary, Bolivia, India, and Egypt. Most of the 22 contributors, who are half Canada-based and half U.S.-based, are in education or applied linguistics departments, with a few from anthropology and sociology.

The term language socialization is used in a very broad sense in this volume. The volume states its aim as “to examine how children, adolescents, and adults in fluid bilingual and multilingual contexts are socialized by and through language into new domains of knowledge and cultural practice” (p. 2). Although this aim is consistent with the language socialization tradition established by Elinor Ochs, Bambi Schieffelin, Shirley Brice Heath, and Susan Philipsen, readers familiar with the works of these seminal authors will not see that much continuity with the current volume. Only five chapters (Luykx on gender socialization among the Aymara of Bolivia; de la Piedra and Romo on literacy practices in a Mexican American family; Cole and Zuengler on the socialization of scientific identities among high school students in Chicago; He on the linguistic and cultural organization of a Chinese heritage language classroom in the United States; and Bell on the complexities of socialization into a Canadian job training program), all of them strong, capture the subtle ways in which linguistic activities and culture mutually constitute each other. Part of this confusing use of language socialization is conceptual. Schecter and Bayley, for example, describe the volume as intended to “explore language socialization from multiple theoretical perspectives” (p. xi), as if language socialization were itself not a theoretical perspective but simply a catch-all term for any research that addressed language in conjunction with education or identities. The reader will be happier with this work if he or she approaches it not as a work on language socialization, but as a more general volume entitled Language, Socialization, and Identities in Bilingual and Multilingual Societies.

Methods and theoretical perspectives vary widely from chapter to chapter. Langman privileges highly reflexive ethnography to describe an ethnic Hungarian dance group in Slovakia. McAll, in a strong contribution, uses a more top-down, sociological perspective to theorize about language use in different labor sectors of a Canadian aerospace industry. A number of chapters (e.g., Pease-Alvarez on Mexican American parental attitudes toward language shift; Lamarre and Paredes on Montreal college students’ language attitudes and identities; Atkinson on English fluency, identity, and social hierarchies at a South Indian college; and Roy on codes, social hierarchies, and standardization at a French–English Canadian telephone call center) rely primarily on survey and interview data. Such chapters provide data on language use between interviewer and subjects and data on language attitudes, beliefs, and (indirectly) ideologies of subjects, but they provide little insight into actual community language use and the unconscious ways that language and culture intertwine.

Given the diversity of methods and perspectives in the 16 case studies, a detailed theoretical introduction or concluding chapter could lend the volume greater coherence, but there is no concluding chapter and a very limited introduction. The two pages of the introduction that discuss the volume as a whole mention important and interesting dimensions of multilingual contexts, such as social associations of different codes, ideologies regarding different codes, language shift, and social identity negotiations, but they do not show how these different dimensions relate to each other and they do not provide a framework within which to situate the diverse case studies. Instructors will have to provide this framing and contextualization themselves and use selections from this volume in conjunction with texts that provide more in-depth explorations of particular theoretical and methodological perspectives.