Abstract
From the outset, language socialization (LS, including first and second language) has been concerned with the ways in which social and cultural contexts provide opportunity spaces for the sociocultural learning of language and in how such contexts vary from culture to culture. The basic tenet of language socialization theory is that children learn language and culture through active engagement in meaningful social interactions with adults and peers. Language learning and enculturation form part of the same process; language is always learned in social and cultural contexts that provide cues for the social and cultural meanings of the forms used, and learners are active agents in their own socialization. Differing from psychological studies of language acquisition, with their focus on dyadic, adult–child interaction in both laboratory and natural settings, LS, being grounded in anthropological and sociolinguistic theories, eschews structured or nonnatural contexts for ethnographic observations of natural, both dyadic and multiparty, interactions. The anthropological approach is exemplified in the work of researchers such as Shirley Brice Heath, Bambi Schieffelin, Elinor Ochs, and others, who have collected ethnographic data in naturalistic settings, focusing as much on the participation structures into which children can enter as ratified participants as on the exact nature of the language used when talking to children. The focus of this chapter is family dinnertime conversation, in particular, which serves as a natural, pervasive, and powerful locus of language socialization within and across ethnolinguistically diverse homes around the world.
Shoshana Blum-Kulka: deceased.
This chapter was produced for the second edition of this Encyclopedia (2008) in Vol. 8, Language Socialization. Sadly, the author has since passed away. However, her scholarship on language socialization within homes, and particularly in the context of family dinners, remains very important. Therefore, this chapter has been reprinted for this third edition of the encyclopedia to recognize her seminal contribution to that literature.
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Blum-Kulka, S. (2017). Language Socialization and Family Dinnertime Discourse. In: Duff, P., May, S. (eds) Language Socialization. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02255-0_6
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