Debra A. Friedman

Becoming National: Classroom Language Socialization and Political Identities in the Age of Globalization

Although schools have long been recognized as primary sites for creating citizens of the modern nation-state, in recent years traditional assimilationist and exclusionist notions of national identity have been challenged by competing values of multiculturalism, hybridity, and transnationalism. This article surveys recent language socialization research that has examined classrooms as sites for socializing novices into political identities associated with membership in a national or transnational community. It explores five broad themes: (a) socialization into the national language, (b) socialization of immigrants, (c) socialization into new forms of national identity, (d) socialization of minority political identities within nation-states, and (e) socialization and transnational identities. The survey concludes with a review of the contributions of a language socialization approach to the study of these issues as well as suggested directions for future research.

Our Language: (Re)Imagining Communities in Ukrainian Language Classrooms.

ABSTRACT Drawing upon video recordings from two fifth-grade Ukrainian classrooms and interviews with children four years later, this paper examines these classrooms as sites for socializing learners into an imagined community of Ukrainian speakers, the extent to which children took up identities as members of this community, and the potential effect of this identification on willingness to learn and use Ukrainian. Microanalysis of classroom interaction illustrates how teachers drew upon prevailing discourses of language and nation in ways that both presupposed and sought to create children’s membership in an imagined national community whose core practices included affiliation with Ukrainian as “our language.” However, interview data reveal that while children readily aligned with this imagined community and voiced its language ideologies, they positioned themselves as peripheral members or alternatively reimagined an alternative, multilingual Ukrainian community.