Language Socialization at the Intersection of the Local and the Global: The Contested Trajectories of Input and Communicative Competence
This article provides a critical review of the theoretical underpinnings of two core concepts in language socialization research: input and communicative competence. We organize our discussion along two major lines of inquiry: ( a) the historical-local and ( b) the language contact–globalization bodies of work. The first part of the article contests the persistent view that input reduces to vocabulary and grammatical structures. To this end, it provides evidence for a more multifaceted approach to input that involves multiparty participant frameworks and multimodality in culturally diverse language socialization ecologies. In this vein, it problematizes language gap studies that are based on middle-class language acquisition models of mother–child dyadic verbal input. The second part of the article challenges monolingual, developmental, and speaker-based models of communicative competence that assume a linear evolution from lesser to greater communicative competence and from more peripheral to more central community membership. It also offers evidence for how communicative competence is socioculturally constructed and, sometimes, interactionally distributed. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 7 is January 14, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.