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Heritage Language Learning and Socialization

Language Socialization

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Language and Education ((ELE))

Abstract

Heritage language learning and socialization take place both at home informally and in the classroom, as well as in other sites. A language socialization (LS) perspective on family/classroom discourse conceptualizes the home and the classroom as meeting places where experts and novices come to negotiate and create multiple, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory knowledge and skills, in addition to values and norms and senses and sensibilities. LS considers the home and the classroom as spaces for that negotiation and co-creation involving many stages through the lifespan. While parents and teachers often act as experts and children and students as novices, the reverse is also possible and perhaps pervasive, especially in the contexts of immigration and language shift. A language socialization perspective considers the home and classroom experience as potential sites to bring about transformative practices and preferences in participants. It is in those moment-by-moment give-and-take situations between the children/students and their parents/teachers that socialization becomes a vivid, lived, family and classroom experience. In other words, in the heritage language home and classroom, socialization takes place both toward and through constantly and locally reenacted, redefined, and reconstructed meanings of “heritage language and culture.”

In this chapter, I highlight (a) insights from language socialization for our understanding of the processes of heritage language learning and maintenance and of the symbiotic social and cultural processes that accompany heritage languages, (b) the new research questions that HL learning brings to the language socialization paradigm, and (c) current challenges and future directions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stony Brook University, 11794, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Agnes Weiyun He

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  1. Agnes Weiyun He
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Correspondence to Agnes Weiyun He .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Patricia A. Duff

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Auckland, School of Critic, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stephen May

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He, A.W. (2016). Heritage Language Learning and Socialization. In: Duff, P., May, S. (eds) Language Socialization. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02327-4_14-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02327-4_14-1

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  1. Latest

    Heritage Language Learning and Socialization
    Published:
    22 May 2017

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02327-4_14-2

  2. Original

    Heritage Language Learning and Socialization
    Published:
    24 November 2016

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02327-4_14-1

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