Language Socialization Across Cultures

by Edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin , Elinor Ochs

• ISBN13: 9780521339193
• ISBN10: 0521339197
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1987-02-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Children's aquisition of language and their acquisition of culture are processes that have usually been studied separately. In exploring cross-culturally the connections between the two, this volume provides a new, alternative, integrated approach to the developmental study of language and culture. The volume focuses on the ways in which children are both socialized through language and socialized to use language in culturally specific ways. The contributors examine the verbal interactions of small children with their caregivers and peers in several different societies around the world, showing that these interactions are socially and culturally organized, and that it is by participating in them that children come to understand sociocultural orientations. They emphasize the salient language behaviours of children and others, and show how these are embedded in broader patterns of social behaviour and cultural knowledge. They reveal that various features of discourse - phonological, morpho-syntactic, lexical, pragmatic, and conversational - carry sociocultural information, and that language in use is a major resource for conveying and displaying socio-cultural knowledge. As children acquire language, so they are also acquiring a world view. This innovative approach to the study of language acquisition and socialization will appeal widely to anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, specialists in communication studies, and educationists.

Table of Contents

Introduction Elinor Ochs

Part I. Acquiring Language and Culture through Interactional Routines: 2. Calling-out and repeating routines in Kwara'ae children's language socialization Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo and David W. Gegeo

3. Prompting routines in the language socialization of Basotho children Katherine Demuth

4. Interactional routines as cultural influences upon language acquisition Ann M. Peters and Stephen T. Boggs

5. What no bedtime story means: narrative skills at home and school Shirley Brice Heath

Part II. Acquiring Knowledge of Status and Role through Language Use: 6. Social norms and lexical acquisition: a study of deictic verbs in Samoan child language Martha Platt

7. The acquisition of register variation by Anglo-American children Elaine S. Anderson

Part III. Expressing Affect: Input and Acquisition: 8. Teasing and shaming in Kaluli children's interactions Bambi B. Schieffelin

9. Teasing: verbal play in two Mexicano homes Ann R. Eisenberg

10. Teasing as language socialization and verbal play in a white working-class community Peggy Miller

11. The acquisition of communicative style in Japanese Patricia M. Clancy

12. From feeling to grammar: a Samoan case study Elinor Ochs.