CLIC Speaker Abstracts

Ana Celia Zentella (Ethnic Studies, UCSD), November 16, 2001.

"Language Socialization Research: Promises and Pitfalls."

As Schieffelin and Ochs maintain, all cultural groups orient their children to and through language, guided by their worldviews about the nature of language and about the role of parenting in its acquisition. Different orientations result in different norms for the social conduct of speech: what, how, when, where, why, and to whom to speak. The children of immigrants and/or ethnolinguistic minorities in the US may have little knowledge of the verbal and literacy practices of mainstream schools. Much has been made of the potential for improving teaching methods and curricula if home-school conflicts in the ways of speaking and learning are identified and addressed. My preliminary work with Latino children from diverse national, class, and generational backgrounds suggests that the bipolar model of situation- versus child-centered families is complicated by bilingual families with transnational networks who incorporate some things old, some things new, some things borrowed, some things blue . The promises of language socialization must be tempered by its pitfalls.