Formal and informal academic language socialization of a bilingual child

Abstract

This ethnographic case study examines a bilingual child's academic socialization in both formal and informal academic communities. The study follows a high-achieving, bilingual student in a public US elementary school, who paradoxically is seen as a slow learner in her Korean-American Sunday school. From the academic socialization and community of practice perspectives, 360 contextual, interactional, and interview events gathered from both communities over the course of one year are analyzed. The findings indicate that explicit norms and peer collaboration have a considerable effect on a child's socialization in a formal academic school context, and furthermore, that the lenient, undisciplined environment and diverse language ideologies present in an informal bilingual academic context, such as a church's Sunday school, also considerably influence a child's socialization. This paper discusses how a bilingual child constructs multilingual and multicultural competences and identities through diverse and even conflicting socialization experiences from two different learning contexts.

Keywords:

• bilingual
• multimembership
• language socialization
• academic socialization
• community of practice

Acknowledgments

The study was prepared from my doctoral dissertation and would not have been possible without the support of Janina Brutt-Griffler, X. Christine Wang, and Erin Kearney. I am grateful to anonymous International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on previous drafts.