Children’s language creativity,emergent performativity,and heteroglossia in multilingual educational settings

Abstract

The number of children spending their time in multilingual educational environments where a cultural variety of languages are used has been rapidly growing in recent decades. By offering spaces for children to socialize with other children, educational settings in particular are crucial social arenas for children to develop social relations across ethnic and linguistic boundaries and where adult authorities provide learning spaces for children to develop language, particularly majority languages. The eight papers in this special issue build on and add to recent research that proposes Bakhtin’s notions of heteroglossia and multivoicedness as gateways into exploring the dynamic, culturally contingent dimensions of children’s language creativity, language use, and language socialization in culturally and linguistically diverse settings.

Introduction

The notion of heteroglossia opens up the possibility of using different theoretical and analytical approaches in the exploration of children’s language use as contextually framed and configured in specific settings (cf. Kyratzis et al., 2010). In this volume, we combine a language socialization (Ochs and Schieffelin, 2011) and peer language (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011) approach with Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) concept of heteroglossia to understand the kinds of meaning-making that children in multilingual peer group settings undertake and the kinds of creativity they exhibit through heteroglossic practices within the peer group and in interaction with adults in educational environments. Heteroglossia refers here to a perspective on linguistic diversity and creativity that focuses on language as doing and as practice and the creative social actions multilinguals take through heteroglossia-in-action (Kyratzis et al., 2010). Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia provides ways of addressing the dialogical relationship between linguistic forms and signs, and the often conflicting sociopolitical and sociohistorical meanings that are negotiated through these forms (Bailey, 2007). Heteroglossia, then, rather than focusing on participants’ “languages” in terms of an enumeration of languages, is about “what signs are in use and action, and what these signs point to” in terms of the participants’ values, ideologies, and social positions (Blackledge and Creese, 2014: 17). A strength of heteroglossia is that it addresses both the co-existence and tension between different signs and forms, and between centralizing (centripetal) forces that push toward unification and a standard language on the one hand and decentralizing (centrifugal) forces, moving toward heteroglossia and disunification on the other (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). Working with the concept of heteroglossia, researchers have examined the tensions and conflicts between hegemonic monolingual standard forms and heteroglossic forms that bi/multilingual children face in educational institutions where monolingual language ideologies are the norm (Blackledge and Creese, 2014; Evaldsson and Cekaite, 2010). The non-referential, social-indexical meanings of signs that, as Bailey (2007) notes, heteroglossia brings forward, provide a way of thinking of language forms (accents, word choices, registers, etc.) as indexing histories of experience and as tools for social and identity positioning, rather than as parts of bounded systems pertaining to nation-states.

A language socialization approach with its main focus on linguistic and cultural reproduction offers unique insights into “the agency of language learners – their capacity for creativity, resistance, and even subversion” (Garrett, 2007: 235). In looking at children’s interactions, language socialization theory provides a way of understanding how children learn to feel, value, talk, and act in ways that are appropriate to a social group or culture through participating in everyday language routines (Ochs and Schieffelin, 2011; Kyratzis et al., 2010; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986). Children are socialized to language and through language. According to theories of language socialization, “children and other novices in society acquire tacit knowledge of language ideologies, cultural norms and systems of belief (ethnotheories) through exposure to and participation in language mediated interactions” (Ochs, 1996: 407; Ochs and Schieffelin, 2011). A key way children learn to use linguistic signs and forms that carry meanings relevant to the social group is through learning indexical associations for the signs. Ochs (1996) uses the term indexical valence to refer to the range of connotational associations – stances, and through these, social categories – a linguistic form acquires based on the social group(s) and practices the speaker has participated in. In any given context, hearers must figure out which meaning from this range of connotations is being indexed by use of the form in the local setting. In contrast to adult-based models of socialization, a peer language socialization approach offers a lens for exploring how children, in interaction with peers in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts, form their own associations between linguistic forms and social categories, and through these associations negotiate more broadly held language ideologies (Bailey, 2007; Garrett and Baquedaño-López, 2002; Minks, 2010; Paugh, 2012: Schieffelin, 2003) while simultaneously building local social organization and cultivating their local peer cultures (Evaldsson and Cekaite, 2010; cf. Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011; Kyratzis et al., 2010).

The papers in this issue address how children in multilingual educational contexts learn to value and use linguistic varieties while exploiting and playing with forms and multiple voices in ways that are negotiated in the peer group. The papers look at interactions within the peer group, as well as between children and adults in educational settings where the peer group exerts influence. In order to situate the papers in prior research, we first look at studies on children’s language creativity and then at those on children’s heteroglossia in multilingual peer group contexts. We then direct our attention to sociolinguistic research on heteroglossia as it has been studied in teen peer groups, with a particular focus on young people’s use of stylization in the construction of language ideologies and peer cultures. Finally, we discuss research on heteroglossia and translanguaging and its implications for education and contemporary social science and sociolinguistic research. We then describe the studies in this special issue, which address children’s language creativity, performativity, and heteroglossia in multilingual educational settings.

Children’s language creativity and performativity

Peer language socialization and Bakhtin’s heteroglossia both deal with human creativity, linguistic diversity, and ideological change. An important contribution of peer language socialization studies, with their focus on children’s agency and peer language practices, is that they show the relevance of using ethnography combined with close analysis of talk-in-interaction to provide broader perspectives on the semiotic resources and social categories drawn upon by children in situated practices (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011). Bakhtin (1981) developed his theory of heteroglossia as represented in the genre of the novel, arguing that the novel draws its expressive strength from the artful juxtaposition and dialogic positioning of multiple voices (i.e., social languages, styles), each indexing different experiences and views on the world. For Bakhtin (1981, 1986), creativity and ideological change are both linked to the dialogic open-endedness of human language and to the social tensions and conflicts between different signs and voices (Bailey, 2007). Through juxtaposing them against one another in the text or novel, there is potential for contrasting and evaluating them in terms of one another and therefore for ideological change. This special issue takes up Bakhtin’s literary theory as a way to explore multilingual children’s language practices – their creativity, and emergent performativity- in everyday interaction among peers and adults across groups and cultures. In children’s peer talk and play, children often engage in the dialogic positioning of different social voices. Researchers have noted how children pull in voices, genres, and ways of speaking from media and the adult world (Cekaite and Aronsson, 2014; Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011; Kyratzis et al., 2010; Minks, 2013; Schieffelin, 2003). This dialogicality, or intertextuality, in children’s play can be attended to from the perspectives of both creativity and ideology. In this section, we focus on children’s language creativity and performativity.

Several research studies show how children from an early age play with language(s) and linguistic forms (Aronsson, 2011; Cekaite, 2018; Duranti and Black, 2011). Language play characterizes children’s discovery of the aesthetic dimensions of language and their emerging mastery of various features of language form (phonological, lexical, pragmatic). This kind of spontaneous, playful creativity in language sensitizes young children to conventions for language use and language form (such as prosodic, syntactic, lexical, phonetic, and conversational features) (Aronsson, 2011). Creativity in language, it is argued, comprises the sources for poetic, literary, and dramatic cultural forms (Duranti and Black, 2011). Sociolinguists also argue for the poetic potential of this kind of often playful creativity in language; that is, for aesthetic purposes or as an expression of creativity (Carter, 2016; Cremin and Maybin, 2013).

Language creativity, or artful creativity through language, is also central to children’s emotional, social, and language learning (Cremin and Maybin, 2013). It has been shown that language play contributes to second-language learning and the development of multilingual competencies (Cekaite and Aronsson, 2005). For example, Cekaite and Aronsson (2014) show how children in a Swedish immersion classroom engage in language play around classroom language teaching routines (e.g., memory games structured around learning particular grammatical structures). The children made innovative playful mislabelings and puns around the target forms, drawing on linguistic ambiguity and variation in semantic and pragmatic meaning. Their language play also involved playful recyclings of one another’s turns – that is, format tying (Goodwin, 1990) to the structure of a peer’s utterance but with transformation – in order to show shared alignment with the peer, or conversely, to turn the words against them in the service of humor and entertainment. Cekaite and Aronsson highlight the performative aspect of immigrant children’s language play: how they are carefully designed to “put language on display” and draw laughter from the peer audience (Bauman and Briggs, 1990).

Other studies also demonstrate how young bilinguals engage in playful aesthetic exploratory talk through soundplay and wordplay, playfully exploiting and transforming meaning associations and features of institutional languages for entertainment and sociality in the peer group (Cekaite and Evaldsson, 2019). Sound and wordplays are also instrumental in organizing participation (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004) among peers, subverting the classroom social order, and enabling engagement in extended entertainment sequences. In language play, second-language learning is supported in a fun, creative environment where children carefully attend to the sounds and rhythmic aspects, as well as the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of language (see also Aronsson, 2011). Children repeat one another’s words to keep the interaction going, as Ochs (Keenan, (1977) observed in the soundplay of her young twins. Creativity resides in how children transform the language structures they invoke to give them new meaning (Duranti and Black, 2011), while building peer sociality and hierarchy and subverting the adult social order. A review of studies of children’s peer interactions illustrates the ingenuity and creativity of teens and children. Children stylize peers as saying cowardly things in reported speech, create alternative social realities through stories and pretend roles through which they hold authority over their peers, or subvert language lessons and institutional forms of talk to entertain their peers (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011: 383). This research shows the importance of taking into account children’s language creativity and agency in creating spaces for both entertainment and educational purposes.

Maybin and Swann (2007) also take a contextualized approach to children’s dialogicality and creativity, in contrast to a literary one, “seeing creativity as contextually (sociohistorically, interpersonally, or generically) specific.” They argue that “it makes little sense to compare conversational word play with a published poem in terms of their literary value.” Instead, each instance should be judged in terms of how it “‘works’ within an interaction (in that people laugh, or continue the wordplay, or fall silent)” (2007: 514; see also Carter, 2016). In this issue, we attend to the dialogicality and creativity of the peer talk of children growing up in multilingual settings. We focus on how children in these settings “creatively call up and recontextualize utterances from prior contexts” (Maybin and Swann, 2007: 512) for their own purposes, which, in the view of the studies, involve orchestrating sociality and participation in the peer group. The ethnographic perspective the special issue studies embody provides a multifaceted window into children’s local peer cultures and interactional orders, and thus into the sociocultural meanings of their talk. From this vantage point we also focus on how, in recontextualizing utterances from prior contexts in their peer talk and play, children also express their sensitivities to, and make commentaries on, the place of different language forms and varieties in the societies in which they are growing up. To situate this focus in prior research, we now move to the next topic: heteroglossia and language ideology in children’s peer interactions.

Heteroglossia and language ideology in children’s peer interactions

As discussed in the previous section, researchers of children’s peer language socialization have noted how children pull voices, genres, and ways of speaking that are circulating in media and the adult world to negotiate participation – how they stand relative to one another (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004) – into the peer group, taking their own stances on these voices and genres (Goodwin and Kyratzis, 2011; Kyratzis, 2004; Minks, 2013; Reynolds, 2010). As children put on improvised performances with their peers in the creation of peer pretend, wordplay, and humorous performances, as they “creatively call up and recontextualize utterances from prior contexts” (Maybin and Swann, 2007), they also explore relations among different social roles, settings, and discourses (Aronsson, 2011; Bauman and Briggs, 1990; Minks, 2013; Paugh, 2012; Reynolds, 2010) in the adult world.

These creative explorations have potential to change indexical associations for the languages in contact in their communities (Kyratzis et al., 2010). One way children do this is through assigning roles and places to the linguistic resources in their repertoires in pretend play (Garrett, 2007; Paugh, 2005; Schieffelin, 2003). By their choosing to emulate particular roles and inhabiting and enacting them in particular ways, children’s pretend play reflects power relations in the larger social world (Minks, 2013). Children also have potential to influence these relations. Paugh (2005: 80) found that children in peer-kin groups in Dominica “transform the associations with the languages through using them in their play.” Although the children were forbidden to speak Patwa (a French-lexicon creole), they used it in their roleplay to enact voices of authority (adult roles) and to create imaginary play spaces for themselves, possibly supporting the maintenance of indigenous languages in the region (Paugh, 2005: 79). For example, a child in Dominica, where Patwa is undergoing a shift to varieties of English, may choose to take on an adult role like that of a bus driver. As he enacts the authoritative speech acts (“get on board!”) associated with this role in Patwa, he achieves a superordinate position in the local participation framework (Goodwin and Goodwin, 2004) among his peers. However, his and his peers’ consistently taking up this role and using Patwa for it may also influence the retention of Patwa among young people in his community (Paugh, 2012).

Children also enregister new, heteroglossic genres in play that draw on resources from multiple named languages. Minks (2010, 2013) reported how a sibling-kin group of trilingual (Miskitu-Spanish-Creole English-speaking) Miskitu children on Corn Island off the coast of Nicaragua coast negotiated their own heteroglossic style of speech as indexical of the social role of caregiver, one that expressed the children’s “experiences of moving between languages and cultures” (Minks, 2010: 516). De León (2018), reporting on the play practices of two sibling pairs of Zinacantec Mayan children who learned Tzotzil Maya at home and Spanish in school, found that the children enacted imaginary genres such as greetings, news broadcasting, birthday parties, and selling and advertising genres, using both languages together. Kyratzis (2010), analyzing an episode of birthday party pretend among a friendship group of Mexican heritage girls in a California preschool, showed how the children maintained language boundaries for different frames within the birthday party episode (Spanish for cooking, English for birthday party themes related to American consumer culture) but also crossed boundaries for reaching out to peers across the frames. According to Minks (2010), these heteroglossic genres and episodes express children’s “experiences of moving between languages and cultures” (p. 516). As contesting boundaries is a key aspect of heteroglossia (e.g., Bailey, 2007), more research is needed on how and when children engage in these practices.

Finally, children may also influence the associations for the languages in contact in their communities through engaging in often playful “metapragmatic activity that prescribes appropriate use” (Agha, 2004: 28), as in making jocular accounts of a peer using a language form defectively. In doing this, they engage in processes of collective valorization that may have the power to challenge or reproduce dominant language hierarchies. Evaldsson and Cekaite’s (2010; see also Evaldsson, 2005) ethnographic studies in linguistically diverse Swedish school settings show how a group of immigrant children, in joking and mimicking linguistic forms in corrective practices (for instance, correcting and commenting on a peer’s limited knowledge of Swedish), established hierarchies in the peer group, simultaneously reproducing the dominant monolingual Swedish ideology. Corrective practices can be seen as a type of authoritative teacher talk that the children take on and use to influence the participation of their peers.

With the exception of the few studies cited in this section, the heteroglossia framework has not been applied to understanding how children, particularly in multilingual educational settings, learn to express attitudes toward different language forms and varieties in circulation in their societies through the ways in which they instantiate and perform these varieties in their peer talk and play. Another understudied issue is how different language forms and varieties serve as resources for children to draw a peer audience and build sociality and hierarchy within peer groups in multilingual educational settings. The papers in this special issue address these gaps.

Heteroglossia in youth language: Identity work and stylization

Notably, there is a wealth of sociolinguistic research on the often stylized heteroglossic practices of young people in multilingual peer groups and how such practices create forms of togetherness that transcend and challenge the linguistic and ethnic boundaries and race stratifications that young people experience in their everyday lives (cf. Madsen, 2014; Rampton, 1995, 2006; Tetreault, 2015). A considerable bulk of studies concerns adolescents’ stylized heteroglossic language practices and social identities in culturally diverse urban settings in schools and during leisure-time activities (Madsen et al., 2010). Researchers have used Bakhtin’s heteroglossia to account for young people’s polylanguaging, namely “the way in which speakers use features associated with different ‘languages’ – even when they know very little of these ‘languages’” (Jørgensen et al., 2011: 1). Polylanguaging as a youth practice has led researchers (e.g., Bailey, 2007; Blackledge and Creese, 2014; Blommaert and Rampton, 2011; Jørgensen et al., 2011; Madsen, 2014; Rampton, 2011, Shankar, 2008; Tetreault, 2015) to question the existence of isolated, named languages, and to envision language as a set of practices rather than skills. Young people in heterogenous settings, and monolinguals too, draw on resources from a range of what have been described as delineated languages or language varieties in a single conversation or even in a single utterance, and use them to index identities and affiliations.

Turning away from the idea of multilingualism as based on bounded languages, research like Rampton’s work on crossing (Rampton, 1995, 2006), Bailey’s (2007) work on Dominican American student youths in Rhode Island, and several other studies on youth language (Jaspers, 2011; Madsen, 2014; Shankar, 2008; Tetreault, 2015) has led sociolinguistic scholars to focus on how linguistic resources and signs come to be associated with particular social features and social categories. When a speaker switches into a code, style, or accent, this serves to carry cultural associations to particular social meanings or identities that are relevant to the situation at hand and are associated with the signs (Blackledge and Creese, 2014; Blommaert and Rampton, 2011; Jørgensen et al., 2011; Ochs, 1996). For example, in Rampton’s work on crossing in a multiethnic middle school in the South Midlands of the UK, Anglo and Punjabi students reported thinking the use of Caribbean Creole was tough and cool, “and associated it with argument, assertiveness, verbal resourcefulness, and opposition to authority” (1995: 37). Anglo, Caribbean, and South Asian students viewed South Asian English (SAE) as “deferential, polite, uncomprehending and incompetent in English” and used it as a form of subterfuge “to undermine white authority figures” (1995: 53) as well as to symbolically draw parallels between situations “in which white adults held institutional sway” and the school’s marginalization of ESL learners (Rampton, 1995: 105). These practices contributed to sociality within the peer group and also consolidated into an “urban youth vernacular” that indexed “solidarity interethnic meanings” (2011), acknowledging the youths’ shared experiences as minoritized working class students within Britain. Other research with minority youths in urban settings has shown young people similarly using heteroglossic practices to index their shared experiences as minoritized youths in urban contexts in the US, France, Denmark, and other settings (e.g., Bailey, 2007; Jaspers, 2011; Madsen, 2014; Shankar, 2008; Tetreault, 2015).

In this work, Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia has been used to explore young people’s artful stylization of others’ voices in their own speech and the ideological positioning that this can accomplish. Bakhtin (1981: 362) defined stylization as “an artistic representation of another’s linguistic style, an artistic image of another’s language.” In his work on language crossing, Rampton (1999) shows how youths, in “styling the Other,” use language and discursive resources “to appropriate, explore, reproduce or challenge influential images and stereotypes of groups that they don’t themselves (straightforwardly) belong to” (Rampton, 1999: 421). Rampton (1999) pointed to how inter-ethnic crossing and stylization “produces, among at least some of the participants, a sense of incongruity that requires extra inferential work” that raises the insistent interactional question “Why that now?” (Rampton, 1999: 423). Stylization turns persuasive images into “speaking persons” (Bakhtin, 1981: 348). In so doing, the youths are provided a means for objectifying the images and discourse and exploring and exposing their “symbolic loadings” and weaknesses (Rampton, 2006: 363–364).

The double-entendre and creative meaning of young people’s heteroglossia and stylization of others’ talk is also a source of peer sociality and entertainment. For example, Tetreault (2015) observed teenagers of Algerian descent in France playfully appropriating and “entextualizing” French television host register in pretend game shows and interviews. The youths carefully attended to the complex grammar and crisp enunciation of this voice. An ironic footing was created that enabled a subversion of the discursive power of the television host to “contextualize ‘guests’ within interactions that are largely of the host’s making” (Tetreault, 2015: 180). The youths took advantage of this power to embed veiled insults and rumors about their peers in derisive performances of the host’s introductions as well as of their peers’ replies to the host, thereby gaining advantage over the peers and eliciting laughter. At the same time, the “phoniness” of the TV host persona, as well as of the French news media, were put on display, the latter of which denies the existence of popular anti-immigrant discourses in France.

A great deal of adolescents’ sociability occurs in large polyethnic, often male groups with social class underpinnings, often separated by gender, in out-of-school contexts that provide significant sites for this kind of heteroglossic language socialization that challenges dominant ideologies and power structures. For example, Garrett (2007) observed how older boys in Morne-Carré in “unsupervised peer contexts,” despite age-based restrictions, used the local language Kwéyòl to (re)position themselves in the peer group while resisting adults’ efforts to socialize them to use the dominant language English. The boys used Kwéyòl to “index adult masculinity” and work out their own domain associations and “subjectivities” for English and Kwéyòl (Garrett, 2007: 249). Although there is considerable research examining the heteroglossic practices of youths in urban settings, there has not been much work looking at children in this respect, especially in multilingual, multiethnic school settings.

Heteroglosia and translanguaging: Implications for education and social science

In today’s globalized world, it is essential to understand how children make sense of and take stances on circulating norms and ideologies of language through their own creative discursive practices within the peer group and in their interaction with adults in their surroundings; especially in the context of schools, where they are confronted with the language ideologies of the dominant host society, which often reproduce raced norms. Recently, researchers, influenced by theoretical frameworks such as translanguaging pedagogies (García and Leiva, 2014) and Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia (Blackledge and Creese, 2014), have called for the need to enact multilingual policies in ways that support the linguistic repertoires and cultural practices used by bilingual and multilingual children in their everyday interaction. For example, through translanguaging – that is, engaging in fluid bilingual or multilingual discourse practices – children can “resis[t] the historical and cultural positionings of monolingualism or of additive bilingualism” (García and Leiva, 2014: 204; Otheguy and Zentella, 2011). Commenting on the implications of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia for designing engaging language arts curricula for children in schools, Dyson noted the extensive heteroglossia in children’s oral and early written discourse. She wrote that “To become artists whose medium is the human voice, students need a curricular space that acknowledges, channels, and builds on children’s attention to everyday voices.” Children attend to the diversity of voices in their experience, so “they need too a school culture of respect for those voices” (Dyson, 2005: 157).

With its turn away from the idea of multilingualism as based on bounded languages, heteroglossia has overlaps with the theory of translanguaging, which began with Cen Williams’s work on Welsh and English in Wales (Williams, 1996) and was then expanded by Ofelia García and other scholars in the US into a theory of language pedagogy and language use. Like heteroglossia, translanguaging leads researchers and educators away from a focus on what named languages a speaker is using or is competent in, to a focus on individuals’ agency in selecting features from their linguistic repertoires for meaning-making and identity positioning (Blackledge and Creese, 2014; García, 2009). Both theories emphasize dynamic or flexible language use, more specifically, the use of resources from more than one named language flexibly in a single utterance or conversation, without attention to which named language the resources come from (Bailey, 2007; Minks, 2013; Li, 2018; Palmer et al., 2014). Heteroglossia in particular, as it has been taken up by sociolinguists, is concerned with speakers’ active meaning-making through the connotative potential (Blommaert and Rampton, 2011; Jørgensen et al., 2011; Rampton, 2006) of signs. The ethnographic perspective of studies like those in this Special Issue provide an emic perspective on children’s meaning-making in the peer group. Heteroglossia, then, rather than focusing on participants’ “languages,” is about “what signs are in use and action, and what these signs point to” in terms of the participants’ values, ideologies, and social positions (Blackledge and Creese, 2014: 17; Kyratzis et al., 2010).

Working with the concept of heteroglossia, researchers have developed alternative perspectives that focus on the tensions between linguistic variety and the sometimes, conflicting codes and ideologies (monolingualism/multilingualism) at play in multilingual educational contexts (Blackledge and Creese, 2014; Kyratzis et al., 2010). For Bakhtin, the pressure toward standardization (referred to as “a unitary language” or the pull of centripetal forces) is constantly opposed to the realities of heteroglossia (centrifugal forces) and “makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia” (Bakhtin, 1981: 270). By attending to the plurality of language practices, linguistic repertoires, values, identities, and groupings that children are exposed to and exploit in everyday interactions, the papers in this special issue together contribute important knowledge on children’s creative language use, language competencies, and social concerns in multilingual and culturally heterogenous communities (Bailey, 2007; Kyratzis et al., 2010). They also provide a fruitful perspective for exploring how educators can take into account children’s language practices as they are brought into play, in both practice and pedagogy. Although much has been written about heteroglossia, values, sign creation, and creativity among peer groups of young people, with the exception of a few studies (De León, 2018; Kyratzis et al., 2010; Minks, 2013) these topics have been less well explored in the peer interactions of children, especially in multilingual school settings.

The papers in this issue address this gap by looking at peer group and adult-child interactions among children aged 3–9 years of age. They draw on a language socialization perspective (Ochs, 1996; Ochs and Schieffelin, 2011; Schieffelin and Ochs, 1986) combined with multimodal conversation analysis (Goodwin, 2018). In arguing that children and other novices of a social group acquire the group’s norms and values through participating in language-mediated interactions (Ochs, 1996), language socialization theory is ideally suited for understanding how children acquire the norms, values, ways of acting and talking, and identities that are essential to the classroom and peer group. Through such interactions, members of a community form associations between social categories, language codes and signs, and social value (Ochs, 1996). Moreover, according to Garrett and Baquedaño-López (2002), members of multilingual communities can be agents of social change in changing these associations. “Multilingual individuals, even young children, may be in a position to renegotiate, challenge, or transcend the existing social categories that are constituted and indexed by the codes and communicative practices at their disposal” (Garrett and Baquedano-López, 2002: 350). The papers in this issue examine this type of agency and creativity in the interactions of children.

The papers in this issue

The paper by Olga Anatoli and Asta Cekaite, Everyday poetics and language play in young children’s interactions in bilingual institutional contexts, focuses on heteroglossia in the peer play of young children aged 1–5 years in a bilingual Swedish-English preschool in Sweden. In the children’s cross-turn alliterations, repetitions, and play with melody and rhythm, they draw on and exploit contrasts between phonetic and grammatical structures (“apple tree,” “apple bush”), named languages (“Greta Gris” vs “Peggy Pig”), and contrasts in fillers for slots in classroom language education routines (self-introduction and naming routines, translation routines) in order to tie to the format of one another’s speech and relate to and sustain interactions with one another. The analysis demonstrates how these young children draw on resources of the bilingual classroom to provide artful ways of relating to peers, including setting up translanguaging spaces of their own.

The paper by Nicola Nasi on Language creativity and Heteroglossia. Children’s performative wordplay as humorous practice, shows how Italian-born and immigrant children in Italy draw on heterogenous verbal resources from prior turns, modifying their lexical and segmental features, to perform humorous, creative wordplay with their peers during classroom language education activities (e.g., finding appropriate adjectives for the word “dog”). They also draw on knowledge of Italian media characters, contemporary technologies, and typical language-teaching genres of the school context to construct incongruous answers and humorous performances. The author demonstrates how the children use these performances to garner audience alignment and how these are important to their organization of friendships and relationships within the peer group. Through constructing a collective sense of peer group in opposition to their teachers, the children’s humorous exchanges subvert the project of socializing them to the national language. At the same time, by providing resources to participate in everyday peer interactions in the classroom, the children’s wordplay, and the teachers going along with it, also support their acquisition of the national language.

The paper by Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Heteroglossia and language creativity in multilingual boys’ chat communication, draws on the Bakhtinian framework to examine multiethnic/multilingual children’s creative language practices in an after-school program in Sweden that provides access to a social media platform for language learning and socializing with peers. The analysis focuses on a particular case of a focal Swedish-Kurdish boy’s chat-communications and in-person interactions with peers around the screen. In chat-communication the peers draw on a diversity of forms, styles, and genres, including a variety of hybrid textspeak, mixed with features from Kurdish, Turkish, Swedish, bad language, and other forms indexing a “tough” urban youth vernacular (Rampton, 2011). They also at times use corrective practices around Swedish orthography and rules for proper language surrounding the media platform. The findings illustrate how children creatively exploit competing normativities, those that push toward standardization and monolingual norms, and toward diversity around youth language forms and heteroglossia, orienting to these at different moments of peer interaction, in the service of peer sociality and achieving status within the peer group.

The paper by Amy Kyratzis, Language Scaling, Heteroglossia, and Identity Work in Boys’ Peer Group Play in a Bilingual Spanish-English Preschool, examines how a friendship group of four boys explores and exploits heterogenous resources and social voices from home, community, and school contexts in pretend play at a bilingual preschool in California preparing children for English-only public school education. Through enacting powerful male social roles (Compadre and Pápi) and maintaining a rigid association to Spanish for them, the boys “scale” up the value of Spanish in the classroom while controlling participation. They also use quite heteroglossic practices when attempting to join play around intriguing topics, for example Spanish-dominant boys joining themes from American popular culture (Fruit Ninjas) and English-dominant boys joining play around Mexican culture-based themes like Compadre and Pápi. In both ways, the children counter processes of centralization around English as the official language of school.

The paper, Translanguaging in the transitions: Bilingual peer interaction in an “English only” classroom in Japan, by Matthew Burdelski examines the language practices of emergent Japanese-English bilingual children in transitional spaces between more structured classroom activities at a school in Japan with an English-only policy. In comparison to teacher-fronted interactions, in which students are led to use monolingual English practices, the activity transitions provide sites for the children to juxtapose the different genres and voices in their repertoires, including Japanese, English, and embodied resources; for example, a martial arts-inspired genre that the boys enact through embodied as well as linguistic resources and an adult voice telling them things they cannot do (“don’t touch the button”). The children enact these voices with a combination of diverse embodied resources and English and Japanese language forms. Such transitional spaces provide sites where peer language socialization takes over and the children exhibit their sociocultural competence, socializing one another to a bilingual norm and countering the pressures toward unification around monolingual English practices, which is the school norm.

The paper by Zejia Xu and Ann-Carita Evaldsson, Young Learner Agency: Footing and Heteroglossia in Bilingual Swedish-Chinese Children’s Heritage Language Learning, uses a multimodal interactional approach to explore how young bilingual Swedish-Chinese preschool children enrolled in a Chinese heritage language school draw on various sociolinguistic resources, voices, and discourses in classroom interaction to create peer alignments. The analysis combines Goffman’s (1981) concept of footing with Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) approach to heteroglossia and multivoicedness. As the teacher introduces Chinese language teaching activities, the children use reported speech to invoke the voices of their parents and grandparents (“but my grandma she said ‘no I cannot eat candy’”), thereby appropriating the epistemic and moral authority of the adult roles. Through tying to the format of one another’s parental revoicings, the children creatively alter the classroom participation framework from a teacher-led IRE language-teaching sequence to a child-initiated, dialogically oriented participation framework. The findings contribute to an understanding of young children’s collective agency in transforming heritage language learning situations into dialogically co-constructed heteroglossic practices.

The last two papers show children’s agency in negotiating translanguaging spaces in interaction with adults. The paper “Taza Qazaqsha” or Translanguaging? Exploring Heritage Language Maintenance Strategies Among Central Asian Kazakh Immigrant Families in California by Munira Kairat and Amy Kyratzis applies conversation analysis to examine parent-toddler interactions in two Kazakh-speaking families in California, one from Kazakhstan and one from China. Parental ideologies push for “Taza Qazaqsha” (“pure/clean Kazakh language”), while the children’s peer and school experiences push for more monolingual English and translingual English-Kazakh language practices. But despite their aspirations, the parents in both of the families integrate translanguaging into their daily interactions, designing them around their children’s interests and linguistic competencies to elicit the children’s orientation toward learning Kazakh. The children exert agency in derailing their mothers’ Kazakh-learning communicative project, doing so implicitly by responding almost entirely in English despite exhibiting understanding of Kazakh. They also do so explicitly, derailing the project of “saying” things in Kazakh when their mothers explicitly orient to this, and invoking their own projects (e.g., drawing). Results point to children’s agency and the realities of maintaining indigenous heritage languages in transnational settings.

The paper by Amanda Bateman and Friederike Kern, Translanguaging in Welsh early years traditional storytelling activities, applies multimodal conversation analysis in exploring the systematics of translanguaging and how it can be used to support heritage language instruction in educational contexts. They focus on the beginning of a storytelling activity about the Welsh collection of stories – The Mabinogion – in a new entrant classroom in Wales, where there are ongoing Welsh language revitalization efforts. The majority of the children there are English-speaking. The analysis illustrates how, in keeping with the school’s policy, the teacher makes a visible and audible effort to set up an environment in which both Welsh cultural and linguistic heritage are the key focus. She frames most of her talk in Welsh, but embeds some English to support the children’s orientation to the talk. The children contribute to this co-production of translanguaging activity by producing either English or Welsh turns in their talk, although most turns are in English. The examples also illustrate how the teacher accomplishes the vital task in heritage language learning of connecting the language to place and identity through facilitating talk with embodied resources.

To summarize, through combining a heteroglossia approach with language socialization, the papers in this issue, rather than focusing on “languages,” are able to illuminate “what signs are in use and action, and what these signs point to” (Blackledge and Creese, 2014: 17) in terms of the valued identities, norms, and shared experiences (voices of parents and grandparents; shared experiences of being members of multilingual peer groups; Disney monsters, Fruit Ninjas, Peppa Pig, and other themes from popular media and peer culture) the child participants orient to. Moreover, the studies are able to illuminate the children’s creativity and how they were able to bring together resources from different language varieties, genres, and voices to entertain their peers, organize local participation frameworks, and create peer sociality. One frequent type of genre children drew on was classroom language education routines, which provided a resource for them to create peer sociality while also learning second-language competencies and metalinguistic skill in manipulating language structure to achieve artful, humorous performances, position themselves, and accomplish social action. Several of the papers show children steering and opposing classroom and family language learning activities and ideologies in a variety of ways, or asserting their rights to use home- or peer-based language forms in these contexts, underscoring the children’s agency. Although children, in contrast to adolescents, may not possess the degree of self-consciousness that is necessary to engage in explicit forms of language activism, adopting the lenses of heteroglossia and language socialization enables a deeper appreciation of the agency of young children, including their ability to influence the retention of heritage languages among young people in their community (Paugh, 2012). The approaches taken in these papers illustrate how children are sensitive to linguistic normativities of different sorts circulating in their communities, and orient to and appropriate them in particular ways as they negotiate belonging and identity in different social groups – peer groups, classrooms, families, etc. – that are meaningful to them in the transnational contexts they are navigating.

These studies have educational implications for how schools can appreciate and support children’s multimodal, heteroglossic practices as welcome ways of meaning-making in classrooms by listening to, understanding, respecting, and leveraging the social voices and identities that children resonate with in their peer talk and play. Children’s natural heteroglossia could be leveraged by providing safe, sustaining spaces for children to pull these voices into artful forms of oral and written discourse in the classroom – whether it be through open classroom language education activities allowing language play, humorous performances, critical discussions of written texts and rap music, or peer writing activities in which peers co-construct and even perform written stories containing dialogue. In such ways, educators can endeavor to implement a literacy curriculum that engages children and youths from non-dominant as well as dominant groups and supports all children’s academic development (e.g., Alim, 2004; Caraballo and Martinez, 2019; Dyson, 2005; García and Leiva, 2014; Low and Sarkar, 2014).