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Оглавление1 Children, Migration and Socialization
Poles in Ireland: Long-Term or Temporary Migration?
According to Tadeusz Szumowski, Polish Ambassador to Ireland from 2006 to 2010, one view of current Polish migration to Ireland is that it is a temporary phenomenon (personal communication to Debaene, October 2007). However, more anecdotal evidence obtained by Debaene (2007) from 30 Poles (aged 20–45) has indicated that the vast majority (20 out of 30) claimed they would stay in Ireland for ‘up to 5 years’ and then return to Poland. ‘I don’t know how long I’m going to stay in Ireland’ was the most common answer among the study’s informants. Moreover, proof of the existing demand for services such as the internet and low-cost phone calls indicates the importance of maintaining contact with relatives and friends in Poland (Kropiwiec & Chiyoko King-O’Riain, 2006). It is also a strikingly mobile population: the ease of travel between the two countries – nine Polish cities are served by direct flights from Ireland and the number of scheduled flights on different routes offered by at least seven airlines is increasing – suggests that migrants can make regular trips home relatively inexpensively.
Schömann et al. (2007) suggests that in contrast to old waves of migration from Poland (more political than economic in character), most of the current Polish immigrants in Ireland perceive their departure/emigration from Poland as temporary – mainly to earn money and gain experience that can be used in Poland in the future (English language fluency is especially valued among Poles). As Schömann et al. (2007) points out, this way of thinking along with frequent visits to Poland, which are no longer limited by political and economic factors, may slow down or even slightly impede integration (which is no longer perceived as a pressing need).
However, the picture emerging from various studies, including questionnaire data for a project funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), does not entirely support this perspective. Some sources indicate, for example, that as many as half of the Poles in Ireland intend to stay permanently (Scally, 2007) and Warsaw-based agency Kinoulty Research found that 50% of the Poles questioned would like to live in Ireland for as long as possible, while 18% want to stay permanently. Data gathered by the Polish market research agency Irish Times (2007) from research conducted in Ireland shows that 49% of their survey participants have no intention of returning home (at least not within the next 5 to 10 years). As Pelowski (2007) points out, migrants who stay in Ireland for more than 10 years are very likely to remain in Ireland permanently. It is a fact that the decision to return to Poland is less likely the longer the Polish immigrant stays in Ireland:
As I know the language better, as I stay here longer, I want to live here. I got used to it. Or rather, I got unused to Poland. I don’t know if I will find myself back there. When I go there for a month for the summer, many things disturb me. I didn’t have that feeling before. Before, there was only homesickness. And now, when I’m in Poland I think that I’m coming back home when I come here. (Female, 34, administrator, cited in Kropiwiec & Chiyoko King-O’Riain, 2006: 34)
Due to the 2010 economic recession (increasing the unemployment rate by 11.0%) and the continuous outflow of immigrants from the EU 12 (the 12 accession countries that joined the European Union [EU] on or after 1 May 2004) representing 19.1% of total emigration from Ireland in 2010, Poles’ long-term plans and intended duration of stay in the host country were highly unpredictable. According to reports by Ruhs (2005) and Kinoulty Research, Polish migrants were employed across a wide range of sectors such as restaurants, hotels, offices, agriculture and health care, and as the data from the IRCHSS-funded project suggest, the art and publishing media. Many of these migrants lost their employment (approximately 9% of all non-nationals came from the EU27 states), yet those entitled to social welfare benefits may have been reluctant to return home until their benefits ceased. Additionally, as Monaghan (2007) observed, many Poles expressed the hope that the job situation was only temporary and that it might improve over time. As anecdotal evidence suggests, many Poles are ‘increasingly rooted in the Irish soil’ and established in their localities. ‘After 12 years we can see that the discussion about whether to go back to Poland pretty soon is mostly just talk’ (Rakowski, 2016). According to the 2011 and 2016 censuses, the Polish community is overwhelmingly young and well educated, with 92% under the age of 44. Polish peoples are concentrated in urban areas, but many sources suggest their presence in almost every Irish town and village. At some point in 2016/2017, the Polish government launched numerous campaigns encouraging young skilled Poles to return home, but with very limited success (Rakowski, 2016).
The sociolinguistic situation of Polish immigrants in Ireland has unique features. On the one hand, Polish immigrants are from large cohesive communities and have well-established links with their home country, but, on the other hand, evidence suggests that there is a widespread desire to become fluent in English and to be part of Irish society (Kropiwiec & Chiyoko King-O’Riain, 2006). In Poland, such fluency is perceived as a major asset in career planning as English is widely taught in Polish primary and secondary schools and is highly valued in many workplaces and various social situations. Gal (1979: 37) states: ‘social changes change social networks [and] relationships between people… social networks are extremely important and are needed to create the opportunity to use the language’.
Poles experience many language and culture difficulties (Drinkwater et al., 2009; Kropiwiec & Chiyoko King-O’Riain, 2006: 45–46). The children of immigrants are also affected by the language barrier, especially when beginning their education in Ireland. As Guidera (2007) reported, one in five immigrant students in post-primary schools in Dublin had little or no English on beginning their education. Language support for immigrant children, then, is considered a significant step in fighting against social disadvantage (Drinkwater et al., 2009; OECD, 2007). As the same study suggests, social disadvantage among first-generation immigrants can be difficult to overcome as children who do not speak the same language at home as during school assessments are two and a half times more likely to be in the bottom quarter of performance indicators.
The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD, 2018) recommends that more should be done to train existing teachers in order to provide inclusive and multilingual education. Despite the obvious need for more resources to help migrant pupils, funds for the coming years are forecasted to be reduced. There is also a significant lack of resources and in-service training for teachers in schools with pupils from immigrant backgrounds with the response to the phenomenon varying from school to school (Lyons & Little, 2009). Nevertheless, a variety of institutions serve the Polish community in Ireland, promoting the Polish culture and helping newcomers to settle in Ireland. Polish ethnic institutions include the Polish Information and Culture Centre, the Polish Social and Cultural Association, the Polish House and the Polish-Irish Society. Such institutions provide free English tuition and offer free information services for newcomers in their native language. The Polish Social and Cultural Association promotes libraries with Polish books as well as organizing various cultural events. According to the National Economic and Social Council of Ireland (NESC, 2006: 235), Polish migrants who have language problems can turn to these associations or contact the Polish-Irish Society for advice on learning the English language or enrolling their children in culture courses.
The Polish (Catholic) chaplaincy in Ireland was established in 2006. It offers religious worship in the Polish language and runs Polish weekend primary schools across the country. As regards education, there are several Polish government-sponsored Polish-medium schools in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Cavan and Waterford, where Polish, Polish history, geography, mathematics and religion are taught. Additionally, there are a number of private and community-led Polish schools around the country, which function as supplementary weekend schools. Their main concern is to provide Polish children with the ability to re-enter the Polish education system at the appropriate age or stage. The study ‘Hopes of Immigrant Children in Ireland’ (Ní Laoire et al., 2009) reported that parents concur that it is essential for their children to ‘keep up’ with the education system in their home country and maintain the language of their home country, even though they do not necessarily intend to return to Poland in the near future.
Polish shops, pubs and restaurants are increasing in number across the country. One notices that Polish signs are becoming commonplace in public areas around Dublin and many services, for example medical providers, have Polish-speaking personnel. According to Singleton et al. (2013), an increased interest in the Polish community in Ireland between 2004 and 2008 (following EU accession in 2004) resulted in increasing enrolments in Polish language courses, and the number of Polish newspapers and TV and radio programmes also increased. All this was visible evidence that Ireland had made significant efforts to accommodate the Polish population. This, however, slowed down significantly during the 2009–2015 recession.
Nevertheless, according to Debaene (2007), there was always a notable absence of support on the part of the Irish authorities for the home language and culture of children of Polish immigrants. Such support was mainly supplied by other agencies including the Polish government, the church and Polish cultural organizations.
Integration with Wider Society
The available data regarding integration within Irish society (mainly from Singleton et al. [2013]) suggest that there is ‘a feeling of relative contentment – or at least an absence of widespread discontentment – as well as a sense that a sizeable proportion of the participants in question are prepared to become part of Irish society on a long-term or even permanent basis’. Additionally, the study ‘Hopes of Immigrant Children in Ireland’ (Ní Laoire et al., 2009) reported that the majority of children from Central and Eastern Europe made new friends through school. Going to school was a vital part of their socialization experience in Ireland. Immigrant children attending Irish schools are entitled to a 2-year English support programme. Once schools decide that the child has attained B2 level, he or she is no longer provided with extra English classes. Children participating in the research described in this book were no longer availing of this programme. Irish schools do not provide formal support for children’s heritage language. For this reason, many children avail of some form of ‘heritage’ language education through the supplementary weekend schools. Blackledge and Creese (2010: 536) found that ‘there was a clear sense that the teaching of “language” was inexorably intertwined with the teaching of “heritage” among participants’. For example, the Integrate Ireland Language and Training (IILT) 2010 study conducted in Trinity College, Dublin, highlighted that making new friends in Ireland and maintaining contact with friends in the children’s home countries were highly important. They often made friends with children from their home countries or other immigrant children (IILT, 2009). The conviction that people and places ‘back home’ were changing while they were not was very common and the children sometimes found this difficult. The IILT (2009: 62) study pointed to the fact that migrating to Ireland had changed some aspects of these children’s personalities ‘such as having to be more outgoing and confident to make new friends’. However, relatively little is known about immigrant children and their own experience of migration and settling down in Ireland. For that reason, this book focuses on Polish children (constituting the largest ethnic minority in Ireland in 2019 according to Census 2016 [Central Statistics Office, 2016]), their families and school communities and attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of children’s own voices and experiences.
Adolescence is a difficult period to define. ‘It is a process rather than a time period, a process of achieving the attitudes and beliefs for effective participation in society’ (Rogers, 1981: 10). The difficulty is in defining not when the period starts but when the adolescent becomes an adult. It is also a time of great physiological and psychological change and development. During puberty, adolescents undergo physical and psychological changes, such as changes in body shape and height, sexual differentiation, as well as personality changes including self-concept construction, self-actualization, achieving a sense of identity and cognitive and emotional changes. Adolescence is also the stage of rapid cognitive development in a person’s life (and the thoughts, ideas and concepts developed during this period greatly influence the individual’s future, playing a major role in character and personality formation.
Additionally, adolescents may experience emotional difficulties during puberty. Psychological changes such as emotional turmoil and personality construction experienced by adolescents are sometimes attributed to the search for a unique social identity: ‘An adequate self-concept is vital to an adolescent’s well-being’ (Rogers, 1981: 30). Psychologists such as Hall (1904; cited in Cravens, 2006) have denoted this period as one of ‘Storm and Stress’ and, according to Hall, conflict at this developmental stage is normal. Conversely, Mead (1961) attributed the behavior of adolescents to their culture and upbringing. However, Piaget (2003) assigned this stage in development with greatly increased cognitive abilities; during adolescence an individual’s thoughts start to take on more of an abstract form and egocentric thoughts decrease, allowing the individual to think and reason over a wider perspective. There is, however, no consensus about what causes the emotional difficulties that are often experienced during this period.
According to Konopka (1973), the search for self begins in childhood; however, ‘intellectual and emotional awareness of self, which emerges from interaction with others, is especially characteristic of adolescence’. Young people may experience ‘feelings of isolation, unreality, absurdity, disconnectedness from their interpersonal, social and phenomenological world’ (Keniston, 1975: 11). As Rogers (1981) points out, self-concepts become less concrete and more abstract with advancing years. Adolescents start to perceive themselves in terms of intrinsic personality characteristics and qualities that contribute to producing a unique self. They do not add new abstract ideas to earlier concrete descriptions of themselves, rather they perceive themselves in a new and complex way. In psychology, identity differs from self-concept in that it is a feeling of distinctiveness from others, whereas ‘self-concept’ involves a person’s total picture of himself or herself (Rogers, 1981: 44–45). The person with a sense of identity feels ‘all of a piece’. Identity formation is considered to be one of the most engaging and important concepts for adolescent development. The adolescent who can form a set of beliefs about religion and politics and make decisions concerning his or her career is considered to have achieved ‘ego identity’ (Erikson, 1968: 167). Many factors and socializing agents, such as parents, peers and teachers, have an important impact on adolescents’ personality development.
It is a widely held belief that everything an individual experiences (e.g. school, social circle, society and familial relationships) contributes to the formation of identity and the concept of self. However, certain experiences, such as interpersonal contacts, play a more fundamental role than others. Through others’ attitudes and opinions, adolescents learn how they are perceived, are often influenced by those opinions and, in turn, start to perceive themselves in the same way. Especially significant are the opinions of persons playing a central role in adolescents’ lives, such as peers and parents and, to some extent, teachers, who, when viewed from a social perspective, play the role of socializing agents.
As parents have a central role in their children’s lives, they are often considered to be the most influential agents of socialization and play a significant role in the personality development of adolescents. During the early years, children are mainly socialized by their parents who enhance socialization by controlling access to other potential agents of influence. They often provide their children with patterns of accepted social norms and conventions including sex-stereotyped moral behavior. Parents decide which school their children attend, and through middle childhood, they also decide who their children spend time with outside school. This situation changes during adolescence. It is claimed that with the beginning of the adolescent years, other agents of socialization such as peer groups and teachers modify and supplement parental influence (Lamb & Baumrind, 1978).
During the early years, parents exert a great influence on their children; however, with the introduction of other socialization agents such as peer groups, teachers play a significant role in later years. ‘As we grow older the peer group remains a primary reference group and source of pressure and influence’ (Feldman et al., 1981). Conformity with current trends is often a driving force for dressing or behaving in certain ways. Frequently, a peer group replaces parents’ influence on social competence and provides additional pressure to conform with current norms and standards (Zigler et al., 1983: 86). Research suggests that peers are very important agents of socialization since they might have much less flexible notions of what is acceptable than adults do (Kohlberg, 1969).
Peers have an influence on the social and cultural competence of children and adolescents. Evidence supporting this idea is available from studies of children who were deprived of social peer contact. These children were found to be socially incompetent (unpopular) or had greater probabilities of maladjustment in school with subsequent low achievement, delinquency or need for psychotherapy (Asher et al., 1977: 39). The latter may relate to minority language children, who, because of their ethnicity or poor language skills experience isolation from their peers or, in extreme cases, racism, discrimination or bullying.
Moreover, teachers tend to encourage and model conventional behavior, thereby supplementing the pressures and demands of parents. As Zigler et al. (1983: 87) point out, in the area of education and academic achievement it is often teachers, not parents, who exert greater influence over adolescents. For example, teachers can impact their students’ motivation to learn and their assessment of their abilities (Gruen & Zigler, 1968; Turnure & Zigler, 1964). Although schools have a significant impact on children’s socialization, their influence does not operate in isolation. Schools often reflect and shape social attitudes. ‘They change to meet current social climates, and they serve as implicit models for family practices. Thus, schools may play a role either in perpetuating or combating social problems’ (Zigler et al., 1983: 87).
Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities between Home and School
Culture and ethnicity have a great impact on the psychological development of adolescents. Being brought up in a different culture and speaking another language may impact general perceptions/views of the abilities and skills needed to succeed in that culture.
Apart from the presence or absence of formal educational institutions (like schools), different cultures and ecological conditions make very different demands on individuals – including children who live in them. Those abilities that are valued and practiced in a society are likely to become better developed than those abilities or skills that are irrelevant to success in that culture. (Zigler et al., 1983: 87)
In other words, children from different ethnic backgrounds may perceive the same things differently or consider various things more or less important as a result of former socialization practices. They may possess various better-developed skills than their counterparts from other cultures. These differences in perceptions, conceptual processing, learning and memory may be related to the demands and practices of the society one lives in or one previously lived in. Thus, the problem of ‘discontinuity’ (the problems caused by discontinuity between the home environments and the school environments and also by home ecologies that are different from new school ecologies) appears when the transition from one mode of being and behaving to another is accompanied by noticeable differences in social tasks and expectations (Marcia, 1987). In this situation, an individual needs time to develop his or her own understanding of the new demands that are being imposed on him or her by the new environment.
Phinney and Chavira (1995) acknowledge the importance of interaction between an individual and his or her environment/cultural context (particularly ethnicity that determines one’s cultural heritage, history and status within society) within which socialization occurs. Immigrant adolescents have an ethnic identity, that is, their personality may result from growing up in a particular society/ethnic group. Developmentally, minority adolescents are beginning to explore identity issues in general (Marcia, 1980) and their ethnic identity in particular (Phinney, 1989). During adolescence, minority youths begin to examine the meaning of their ethnicity and minority status. Therefore, adolescence is a very challenging period for minority adolescents as not only do they start searching for their unique self-identity but they also need to accommodate their ethnic and cultural identity within their own social identity.
Language Socialization Perspective on Adolescence
Assuming the perspective that language socialization (LS) takes place across one’s life span allows the period of adolescence to be perceived as particularly important. It is ‘the period at which individuals in modern societies find themselves at the intersection between childhood and adulthood, the period during which social identity formation becomes central’ (Langman, 2003: 182). If LS is perceived not as a developmental process leading to adulthood but as a ‘social practice’ (where individuals become agents of socialization), membership of a particular group (a community of practice) as well as ‘practice in its own right’ becomes fundamental to both LS and identity construction processes. As Langman (2003:184–199) points out, an individual ‘practices’ his or her identity concerning a wide variety of communities of practice ranging from a school group to a community group such as a church group or family. ‘In such practice, dimensions of identity-related to various social categories such as ethnicity, class, gender are practiced and negotiated in specific social settings’ (Langman, 2003: 182).
Nevertheless, at various moments in our life, it frequently happens that one particular community of practice may become central – the most influential to one’s identity practice/construction. A review of the current literature suggests that children of all ages, especially adolescents, have a strong need to belong to certain groups/social circles. ‘No one but an adolescent can be fully socialized well-functioning member of certain adolescent group’ (Langman, 2003: 183). Taking the perspective of LS as a social practice phenomenon enables viewing both socialization and social identity construction from multifaceted perspectives (Eckert, 2000). Thus, adolescents engage in negotiating their social identity in age-appropriate ways (i.e. negotiating values, beliefs and power relations) in response to the social environment (communities of practice) in which they find themselves, for example, school settings, peer groups, family and other communities to which they belong. This book illustrates these processes, highlighting parental choices and adolescents’ own agency.
Key Issues in Socialization and Second Language Socialization
Wentworth (1980) states that socialization can be viewed from various perspectives; however, the central element of socialization is the same. It refers to the role assigned to the individual in the process of becoming a member of society. Merton (1949) and Parsons (1937, 1951) perceived socialization as a passive phenomenon through which individuals internalize the values of society comprising those relating to personality and behavior to function in society. In comparison, for Mead (1961) socialization is a process in which individuals and society shape each other through social interaction. Theories within a ‘socialization-as-interaction model’ have focused on the processes of socialization, including symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969), phenomenology (Schutz, 1967), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and structuration (Giddens, 1979) theory.
These latter theories consider ‘the medium through which the ability to produce society is transmitted from member to novice’ (Wentworth, 1980: 79), which is ‘the interaction that constitutes socialization’ (Wentworth, 1980: 83). In other words, such theories focus on how children or novices acquire the knowledge, orientations, ideologies and practices that enable them to participate effectively in the social life of a particular community. This process – actually a set of interrelated processes – is realized through the use of language, which is the primary medium through which culture and knowledge are communicated. According to Talmy (2008), the theory of socialization most often adopted in studies concerning language and culture originates within all the aforementioned ‘processes’.
LS has its roots in linguistic anthropology (Hymes, 1972; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986a); however, it also borrows from sociology (Bourdieu, 1977; Bourdieu & Thompson, 1991), cultural psychology (Rogoff, 1990) and education (Duff & Hornberger, 2008), and from more recent research on literacy socialization (Budwig, 2001; Duff & Hornberger, 2008; Rymes, 1997). However, LS research does not limit itself to the aforementioned fields. It also has associations with psycholinguistics and developmental psychology (Bloom, 1998; Bugental & Goodnow, 1998). As Duff (2009) notes, LS differs from these other research disciplines in its more ethnographic approach. It explicitly recognizes culture as a significant factor influencing many aspects of an individual’s development across the lifespan, in which LS plays a partial but vital role. It also underlies the cross-disciplinary complexity of the process of LS and its dynamism concerning the practicalities of people’s lives.
LS is the lifelong process by which individuals—typically novices—are inducted into specific domains of knowledge [such as knowledge of language and literacy], beliefs, affect, roles, identities, and social representations, which they access and construct through language practices and social interaction. (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1986, in Duff, 1995: 508)
It is, therefore, a very comprehensive and cross-disciplinary approach offering the possibility of an in-depth understanding of a studied context or community.
Traditional research on LS focused on first language (L1) socialization, which takes place in early childhood (Ochs, 1988; Schieffelin, 1990; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986b). Therefore, primary theories of LS entail the processes by which an individual (child) becomes a member of the society in which he or she lives, through adaptation and internalization of the norms and practices accepted by that society. Children and other users of language develop competencies across cultural, linguistic and historical areas. These norms, practices and competencies are rooted in society, from which individual members transmit them to new members (Auer & Wei, 2007: 74–76). As young children interact with their caregivers, they learn not only how to speak, but also how to recognize, negotiate, index and co-construct diverse types of meaningful social contexts. By engaging with others in various circumstances, children expand their horizons by taking on new roles and status. They also learn how to think, feel and express those feelings. Language acquisition, therefore, is much more than just a child learning to produce well-formed, referential utterances; it also involves learning ‘how to co-construct meaningful contexts and how to engage with others in culturally relevant meaning-making activities’ (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002: 342). More recently, researchers and scholars have expanded the scope of LS research to second language (L2) socialization, which is a lifelong and a ‘life-wide’ process across communities and activities. L2 socialization is a process by which an individual (a non-native speaker of a given language) seeks competence in an L2 and membership of a community of practice, to gain inclusion and the ability to actively participate in the practices of the community (Duff, 2009: 2). L2 socialization processes can be experienced by immigrants who seek competence in the language and a new community of practice and by people returning to a language they once used but have since lost proficiency. It can take place in a variety of language contact settings, such as a place where an L2 is the dominant language of a society, or in restricted and more isolated contexts, as in the case of foreign language classrooms or diaspora communities (see Duff, 2009). For many people living in multilingual or bilingual societies or in contexts described above, the contrast between ‘first’ and ‘second’ is often much less evident than these two labels suggest; ‘what was once a first language might lose ground, functionally, to an additional language, which then may become the person’s dominant language’ (Duff, 2009: 43). Additionally, some current studies have investigated the shifting identities of individuals that are often negotiated through LS processes within linguistically and socioculturally heterogeneous settings, characterized by contact between two or more languages and cultures (e.g. Bayley & Schecter, 2003; Eckert, 2000; Hoyle & Adger, 1998; Katz, 2000; Langman, 2003; Schecter & Bayley, 1997, 2003; Watson-Gegeo & Nielsen, 2003; Willett, 1995; Zuengler & Cole, 2005). Therefore, it is widely acknowledged in the literature that LS is experienced throughout one’s lifespan through social interactions between ‘experts’ (those who have more proficiency in, for example, a language, literacy and culture) and ‘novices’ (those with less proficiency). This occurs as an individual enters new ‘communities of practice’ such as schools or the workplace (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Thus, LS is claimed to be speech events at any given time in one’s life (Garrett & Baquedano-López, 2002; Ochs, 1986a; Ochs & Schieffelin, 2008). In other words, to become competent members of new sociocultural groups, individuals often continue to be socialized into new roles, status and practices throughout their lifespan. As Duff (2009: 2) notes, formal and informal socialization through more than one language and culture is a common experience and can be broadly found in numerous bilingual and multilingual societies and communities. However, this has only recently emerged (Duff, 2003; Zuengler & Cole, 2005) as a systemic area of research in applied linguistics. As emphasized, children, adolescents and adults alike have their personal histories, desires, needs, fears, identities and choices concerning the discourses they negotiate, the stances they take and the power structures they encounter. As a result, the process and outcomes of LS in societies and communities undergoing social and cultural change cannot be predicted (e.g. Duff, 2002b).
Agency, Parents and Socialization
Agency can be defined as one’s ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahearn, 2001: 112). It should be noted that this concept is understood as a complex notion that is negotiated and achieved in culturally or linguistically specific contexts. This study follows this framework to understand Polish children’s agency. I consider agency as emerging from the positioning of oneself and others within a discursive practice because language often reflects one’s desired or ideal ways of being, as shown by Du Bois (1987), Duranti (2004) and Kockelman (2007).
Studies such as Garrett and Baquedano-López (2002: 350) and Corsaro and Miller (1992) demonstrate that children have great potential for ‘interpretive reproduction’ as opposed to more reproduction of social norms and orders. More recently, Lanza (2007) and Wright-Fogle (2012) have shown that children are active and creative agents of socialization who create their social worlds.
More recent studies of LS focus on how children socialize or influence their parents (Gafaranga, 2010). None of the parents in this study reported close relationships with their Irish neighbors or work colleagues. Thus, children in this study often socialized parents by bringing home new social norms. These norms were often contested and ended up somewhere on the ‘right and wrong’ continua. Perceived in this way, immigrant children in this study played an enormous role in their parents’ socialization.
Children’s agency has also been found to be very important for parental language policy. Spolsky (2004) has distinguished three main areas of investigation of home language: (i) language practices, (ii) language ideologies and (iii) language management. Thus, children’s language learning in the home environment is mediated not only by parental language ideologies but also by learning and the role of children in society in general (De Houwer, 1999; King & Fogle, 2006). Multiple or competing language ideologies or conflicts between implicit vs explicit ideologies (King & Bruner, 2000) are often at play in the context of transnational families, which are the ‘genesis of language policies’ as Fogle (2012: 20) points out. Parental language strategies have often been at the center of these studies. The current study is adding to these developments by illustrating how parental engagement in community organizations plays a significant role in the socialization of adolescents’ ethnic identity and language maintenance. This is different from other studies of bilingual LS or family language policy as the focus is not on parents’ language strategies (use of the L1) but on the choices they make for themselves about staying connected to the heritage community.
In L2 socialization research, the focus has been on the agency that leads to participation and legitimate membership within new communities of practice. Ahearn (2001: 130), in claiming that it is particularly useful to distinguish between different types of agency, distinguishes between (i) oppositional agency, (ii) complicit agency, (iii) agency of power and (iv) agency of intention. She also acknowledges that multiple types of agency are often exercised by participants in a given situation or context. In her analysis of transnational families, Fogle (2012: 29) shows multiple forms of agency at play. She describes how ‘newness of the institution and consciousness of the participants’ in the creation of the new family help them to both participate and resist in shaping the new norms. Fogle’s (2012) work on adoptive families is contributing to the types of agency experienced within the family context. She highlighted three types of agency: (i) resistance – ‘nothing’ responses; (ii) participation through the frequent uses of ‘wh-questions’; and (iii) negotiation of language choices with their parents.
Moreover, Fogle and King (2013: 20) argue that older children have even greater agentive abilities ‘within transnational families, where family members with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds come together and the negotiation of such differences play a large part in establishing new family roles and relationships’. This approach to agency is very relevant to this study of immigrant adolescents and their families. In the present context, agency is displayed not only in the form of resistance and opposition but also in a more complicit or more intentional form. As shown in the following chapters, children’s agency is often exercised/embedded within a larger sociocultural context and parents’ involvement in the contexts and communities outside of the home.
Language Socialization and Education
Duff (2009) notes that a large amount of LS research has been deeply concerned with educational processes and issues, such as the positioning of diverse, and somewhat (potentially) disadvantaged, language learners in linguistic communities (Duff, 2008; Heath, 1983). Globally, issues in bilingual and multilingual learning communities (or monolingual-dominant societies with novices who are, or are becoming, multilingual) have gained increasing prominence in educationally oriented LS, especially in regions such as Cameroon (Moore, 1999, 2008), Canada (Bayley & Schecter, 2003; Duff, 2003), Hungary (Duff, 1995, 1996), Japan (Cook, 2008), the Solomon Islands (Watson-Gegeo, 1992) and the United States (Baquedano-López & Kattan, 2008; Barnard & Torres-Guzmán, 2009; Bronson & Watson-Gegeo, 2008; He, 2008), to name just a few researchers and their work. Thus, the scope of LS research and perspectives has widened over time to include new populations of people; contexts affected by language contact and language shift; phenomena such as postcolonialism, transnationalism and globalization; socialization of morality; and, more recently, new content area specialization into which people seek membership. As Duff (2008: 112) notes, this expansion of the previous LS field and the linguistic ecology of communities reveals the critical importance of understanding learners’ prior experiences of LS and how those cumulative socialization experiences affect their present and perhaps future experiences and trajectories as language learners and users, often across multiple communities and timescales (see Kramsch, 2002).
According to Schieffelin and Ochs (1986b), educational systems have always played a major role in the socialization process and LS, with educational institutions among the primary sites through which individuals are socialized to take particular roles in the society in which they live (Bayley & Schecter, 2003; Oakes, 1985; Olneck, 1995). When we extend the LS perspective beyond its initial setting to ‘secondary’ LS (which is experienced throughout one’s lifespan), as in the case of immigrants, it can be concluded that ‘schools are also significant sites of secondary socialization’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Education is also a significant domain in which the integration of immigrant groups, in terms of assimilation versus multiculturalism, can develop. For this reason, the cultural and linguistic diversity of classrooms in Irish schools poses one of the most urgent challenges for educators. As experience elsewhere has demonstrated, however, majority groups often make strong demands on immigrant minority groups for integration in the sense of assimilation. These majority groups are commonly very reluctant to promote, or even accept, the notion of cultural diversity as a determining characteristic of an increasingly multicultural environment, and schools may either represent this societal attitude or promote the idea of multiculturalism (Extra & Verhoeven, 1999: 4–6).
Immigrant Children and Intercultural Competence
It is widely acknowledged in the literature that what we accept as the only logical and natural norms of behavior are often conventional for our own culture. Whenever we talk, ‘we bring into communication our culturally conditioned set of beliefs and speech habits’, both verbal and non-verbal (Stroińska, 1997: 22). This kind of communication may turn out to be problematic or simply not work in a contact situation such as the case of immigration. But what does it mean to communicate successfully in rapidly changing multicultural landscapes?
Various communication competence definitions underline the development of skills to transform one from a monocultural person into a multicultural person. ‘The multicultural person is one who respects cultures and has tolerance for differences’ (Chen & Starosta, 1996, in Jandt, 2004: 45). Byram (2000) and Kramsch (2011) propose an interesting outlook on these issues, calling for ‘intercultural competence’ to be key for successful communication and better retention of knowledge in these complex international settings. Intercultural competence is defined as ‘the ability to see relationships between different cultures – both internal and external to society – and to mediate, that interprets each in terms of the other, either for themselves or for other people’ (Byram, 2000: 10). It is then reasonable to perceive ‘intercultural competence’ to be a necessary skill in the multicultural environment, in particular, in the context of education where children from different cultures, speaking different languages at home, are engaged in complex learning tasks and interactions. Byram notices that it is the educators’ role to equip their students with this unique competence:
The cultivation of such intercultural individuals falls on the shoulders of today’s educators. They should provide students with opportunities to help them define and design for themselves their ‘third place’ or ‘third culture’, a sphere of interculturality that enables these students to take an insider’s view as well as an outsider’s view on both their first and second cultures. It is this ability to find/establish/adopt this third place that is at the very core of intercultural competence. (Byram, 2000: 11)
Li and Kramsch (2011) explains that ‘intercultural competence’ is a ‘symbolic competence’ that does not replace the concept of communicative competence. Whereas communicative competence is distinguished by the negotiation of meanings in authentic contexts, ‘symbolic competence’ has to do with almost ‘non-negotiable discourse worlds’. These include the distribution of values and identities across cultures, and inventions of meaning that are often concealed behind frequent illusions of effective communication (Kramsch, 2008: 390). As experience elsewhere has demonstrated, the development of the aforementioned ‘symbolic competence’ might be crucial for the future academic and personal success of immigrant children. Studies such as Duff (2010) suggest that socialization within the academic/schooling environment, including language and cultural socialization, plays a big role in the overall success of these students. Socialization within a given language and culture includes not only oral and written forms, but also different genres, registers, speech acts, socio-historical norms and the social meanings they index, which are diverse by nature. As Roberts (2009, in Duff, 2009) suggests, this diversification naturally increases when individuals move to more complex uses of language such as academic or professional, or more technical or other specialized social spheres of language use.
Therefore, the perspective on socialization presented in this book demonstrates that it entails not only learning a set of cognitive and linguistic skills but also cultural apprenticeship and norms. It underlines the historical and cultural nature of language development including literacy practices, social positions and identities that are related to locally shaped language practices, as outlined by Sterponi (2009) in her studies of literacy. The language of schooling can be understood in terms of Bourdieu and Thompson’s (1991) ‘habitus’ as it represents a set of historically contingent and culturally suited organizing principles that shape individual engagement with language including practices and studying the subject area. For example, it may happen that some children are not sharing the same discourses as their peers because they may lack the background knowledge about local culture or current educational practices (often being labelled as English as a second language [ESL] students) in a given sociocultural context (Waterstone, 2008). In this way, they may become silent and feel detached from and rejected by the social group they are trying to access, for example during ‘group work’ (see Duff, in press). These differences in perceptions and conceptual and emotional processing may be related to the demands and practices of the society one lives in or had previously lived in. As evidence elsewhere suggests, immigrant students remain involved in their primary communities and their cultural values and norms (family and friends); in turn, this requires more and more compromises to be made on logistical and ideological grounds (Duff, 2009). If not understood and supported, this might lead to psychological problems and, in extreme cases, to academic failure. The remaining chapters of the book tap into the aforementioned issues and shed light on how Polish immigrant children engage in developing their symbolic competencies across two languages and two communities of practice – school and their families. Their agency, stances and positions on the values and norms observed across two cultures are illustrated.
