Abstract
Adolescents appear rarely in research on language socialization taking place in communities of any type. Yet, when researchers look closely and connect with adolescents in their daily lives, deep language habits come about through friendships and peer interactions. Moreover, such socialization contexts for young people stretch back to the Middle Ages and will surely move into the future. Why? Voluntary learning , or picking up skills and information identified by the young as vital to their interests, means gaining new words and ways of talking and thinking. Since formal schooling, particularly during the adolescent years, has come to be regarded as of little practical use by many of these learners, they increasingly seek other sources of information and skills. Driving this search are the interests and self-perceived and friend-affirmed talents of the young. Learning to play the guitar, successfully carry out special moves in sports, or devise ways to make peers laugh depends on taking in nuanced ways of representing the world. Researchers have much to learn from adolescent language socialization, but as scholars do so, they must respect the young and work to gain their trust and confidence. As they do so, scholars will find that adolescents quickly become curious about how and why adults genuinely feel they need to learn from the young in their communities of voluntary learning. Methods, largely shared with and sometimes carried out by the young in collaboration with researchers, must be nonintrusive, open to review by the young, and honest about motivations behind the research.
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Heath, S.B. (2017). Language Socialization in the Learning Communities of Adolescents. In: Duff, P., May, S. (eds) Language Socialization. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02255-0_16
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