A Study of a Male Spouse’s Language Emergence as a Socialization Process with Respect to his Workplace, Family and Spouse Identities
Secil Somer, Anadolu University (Turkey)
Abstract
This paper reports on a single case study of a male spouse’s language emergence and social adjustment as a result of moving to the US for his wife’s doctoral study. The study interprets language emergence as a socialization process. Theoretical framework of the study is built on social identity theory of Tajfel (1974), imagined communities (Wegner, 1998), Norton’s (1995) the notion of investment and Bourdieu’s (1977) metaphor of capital. Based on these theories, language participation and non-participation of an expat moving to the US is highly affected by the concepts of silence, resistance, and power differences. In this study, it is argued that language as a socialization process and language emergence can be explored by focusing on different identity categories and identity transformations of an individual such as identity at work, intercultural identity in friendship relations, and identity as a spouse. Although the present research informs the language socialization of a language learner who had formal education only for a limited of time, it provides some implications for second language teaching.
Keywords: language emergence, case study, language socialization, language and identity;