Introduction

At the turn of the century, transnational adoption emerged as a growing and important phenomenon in contemporary society that has changed the way people view family and kinship and, by extension, culture (Howell, 2007; Volkman, 2005). The rates of US adoptions from abroad nearly tripled in the years 1990 to 2004 (Vandivere et al., 2009), and the phenomenon of transnational adoption has touched numerous lives around the world. In addition, transnational adoption has been a topic of intense media attention and public discourse in Western cultures. Celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt have been both admired and maligned in the popular press for the motives and methods of their multiple adoptions from various nations (Russell, 2009; Simpson, 2009). Further, cases such as Artyom (Justin) Hansen, who was returned to Russia alone on a plane by his US adoptive mother, incited anger and fear on the part of parents, government officials and the general public both in the US and in Russia (Levy, 2010). In short, transnational adoption has become a touchstone issue for understanding the West's position in a globalizing world.

In this maelstrom of high-profile media attention, it has been hard to hear the voices of everyday adoptive families and harder still to understand what life in an adoptive family is like. How do adoptive families create lasting bonds and how, for example, do older adoptees manage the transitions to a new country, language and home? This book focuses on one important aspect of transnational adoption – the second language acquisition of English by older children adopted from abroad by US adoptive families. In examining everyday conversations audio-recorded by three Russian adoptive families, I discuss the role language plays in forming a family across linguistic and cultural differences, how learning and using a second language (for children and adults) relates to establishing bonding relationships in the family, and how children themselves develop agency in language socialization processes. I provide detailed linguistic analyses of discourse level processes (such as storytelling [narrative talk], talking about language [languaging episodes] and switching between languages [code-switching]) in these families' everyday conversations to show the active role that children play in shaping language learning and identity formation. This research contributes to how we view second language learning and socialization as well as how we understand learning processes in the transnational adoptive family.

Language Socialization

The language socialization paradigm originally sought to integrate psycholinguistic perspectives on first language acquisition by children with anthropological insights on socialization (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984; Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Language learning from this point of view is considered an essentially social phenomenon that is mediated by culture and language. Language socialization, or the socialization of children or other novices to language and through language (Ochs & Schieffelin, 1984), has most often focused on top-down processes, or the role of experts (parents) in shaping novices' (children's) behaviors and practices. Recent approaches to the study of socialization in childhood, however, have begun to emphasize the active role children play in their own learning processes and the co-constructed and collaborative nature of socialization (Corsaro, 2004; Kulick & Schieffelin, 2004; Luykx, 2003; Luykx, 2005). Concomitantly, recent studies in second language socialization, or the process in which non-native speakers of a language (or individuals who have lost competence in a language they once spoke) seek both competence in the second language and to become members of a community in which it is spoken, have emphasized the contradictory and conflicted nature of such processes as learners may reject or resist target language norms (Duff, 2011). Drawing these two strands together, this book takes as a starting point the notion that young second language learners can actively shape the interactional contexts in which they participate, and in so doing, create opportunities for learning for themselves and socialize adults into meeting their linguistic, interactional and identity needs.

Focusing on the ways in which children and other learners affect the world around them is important for understanding second language learning processes, as well as the processes of socialization that occur in contexts such as the transnational adoptive family. In the chapters that follow, I illustrate two main points: (a) that second language socialization, or the apprenticeship of young transnational adoptees into the linguistic and cultural norms of the US family, is a bidirectional and often child-directed process (i.e. parents often accommodate linguistically to children's direct influence), and (b) correspondingly, life in adoptive families requires quotidian negotiations that entail the creation of new family practices and norms. Through the analysis of interaction in these three families, I demonstrate both the collaborative and co-constructed nature of language socialization processes and elaborate on the transformations that Duff (2011) notes are characteristic of second or additional language processes (see also Garrett & Baquedano-Lopéz, 2002; Kulick & Schieffelin, 2004).

Most studies of the second language socialization of young English language learners have been conducted in classroom settings. The past two decades of research on young English language learners' experiences in schools has ushered in a new focus on the complex social worlds and identities associated with second language learning. Norton and Toohey (2001), for example, argued that being a good language learner was the result not only of the acquisition of linguistic competence (i.e. the language code), but also of having access to conversations and discourses that make it possible for learners to become members of their new communities. Sociocultural and ethnographic approaches to second language learning have emphasized a focus on learner participation in communities of practice, such as classrooms and peer groups, as a way to understand these complex and sometimes confounding processes (Duff, 2008b; Hawkins, 2005; Toohey, 2000; Willett, 1995). In studying the language socialization processes that occur in adoptive families, this book sheds light on socialization and learning processes in middle-class US families that connect with school and classroom practices and, specifically, how children in the family environment achieve a sense of agency that facilitates language learning in interactions with adults.

The way that students act and behave, the extent to which their own...