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