Second Language Socialization and Learner Agency: Adoptive Family Talk (Bilingual Education & Bilingualism, 87)

This book examines how Russian-speaking adoptees in three US families actively shape opportunities for language learning and identity construction in everyday interactions. By focusing on a different practice in each family (i.e. narrative talk about the day, metalinguistic discourse or languaging, and code-switching), the analyses uncover different types of learner agency and show how language socialization is collaborative and co-constructed. The learners in this study achieve agency through resistance, participation, and negotiation, and the findings demonstrate the complex ways in which novices transform communities in transnational contexts. The perspectives inform the fields of second language acquisition and language maintenance and shift. The book further provides a rare glimpse of the quotidian negotiations of adoptive family life and suggestions for supporting adoptees as young bilinguals.

Lyn Wright Fogle is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics/TESOL at Mississippi State University. She holds a PhD In Linguistics from Georgetown University and an MA in TESOL from American University. Her research focuses on sociocultural aspects of second language learning and bilingualism with an emphasis on second language socialization, learner identities, and language policy. She is a co-editor of the volume Sustaining linguistic diversity: Endangered and minority languages and language varieties (Georgetown University Press), and her work has appeared in journals such as The International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism and Language and Linguistics Compass.