Language and Socialization

What is the relationship between acquisition of language and socialization through language?

What do Ochs and Schieffelin say?

The process of acquiring language and the process of acquiring sociocultural knowledge are intimately connected

In groups of 4 or 5, come up with a list of tips for either encouraging language development in children or learning a foreign language

Discuss

• How do they differ between native speakers of other languages?
• How are these tips connected to social expectations and norms in American society?

Social Context and Language Development

Social construction of reality: the development of jointly constructed understandings of the world that form the basis for shared assumptions about reality.

Social Construction Skit

How does socio-cultural context influence literacy learning?

What did Heath find through her ethnographic work?

Heath (1982)

• participants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know from and about the written material
• the monolithic way of teaching and exercising literacy in schools does not cater to other "ways of taking" information, which could explain achievement gaps in reading comprehension

Article Groups

• What was your article about?
• Compare this media account of the achievement gap between majority and minority students with Heath's article
• What are the differences in their approaches? What types of information do you get from the media articles? What types of information does Heath present?
• Do you see any weaknesses in either?

Language and Institutions

Institutions play a significant role in socializing individuals to the norms of comportment and knowledge that are historically valued by society

How do institutions vary in the way they organize behavior and knowledge? What role does language play in these processes?

Baquedano-Lopez claims that reading the Act of Contrition in doctrina is a collective ritual that allows individuals to remember, recognize, and act according to already internalized patterns of conduct

Michel Foucault (1926-1984), a French philosopher, historian, and social theorist

Foucault's Ideas

• Discipline and Punish, 1975
• Transition in the modern world from ritual displays of power to disciplinary forms of power
• Discipline as a series of techniques by which the body's operations can be controlled
• Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon

Everyday examples?

"The insistence that students recite the AOC even before they can decode it illustrates the primacy of the verbal over the text and the value placed on memorization" (Baquedano-Lopez, 121).

What other acts of socialization were occurring that legitimated certain norms?

Language and Media

Revolutionary transformations

• Language itself
• Writing
• Printing
• Telegraph
• Telephone
• Radio, Television, Cinema
• Computers, the Internet
• Mobile phones

How do we categorize forms of communication? What constitutes writing?

DeFrancis

• The invention of the rebus principle marked the birth of true writing
• No script with a zero percent phonetic component can function as a full writing system but a language with only a small phonetic component can

Group Activity: construct a sentence using the rebus principle