Language Socialization, Participation and Identity: Ethnographic Approaches

Introduction

Ethnographic research examining educational discourse has for several decades focused on how students are inducted or socialized into new subject matter at schools and other learning sites and how language and literacy practices mediate their learning and are themselves a goal and outcome of learning. There has thus been considerable emphasis on how students learn to engage in the sanctioned oral and written discourse practices of different disciplines and social groups, how they negotiate the routine questions, responses, and feedback behaviors of their teachers and peers, as well as other forms of accepted (or sometimes subversive) interaction, and how, in the process, they become more sociolinguistically competent participants in, or members of, these local cultures or learning communities.

With minority students or students experiencing linguistic/literate schooling practices different from