The Multilingual Adolescent Experience

Small Stories of Integration and Socialization by Polish Families in Ireland

By (author) Malgorzata Machowska-Kosciak

Publication date:

09 October 2020

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781788927673

This book contributes to our understanding of how older learners negotiate family internal and family external socialisation processes and thereby how parents’ ideologies and practices, peer socialisation, and language status or societal demands come together in adolescents’ lives. It integrates the sociohistorical context and adolescents’ attitudes with the parents’ role. Through the use of ‘small stories’ and ethnographic observation this book explores the social and cultural worlds of Polish immigrant adolescents in Ireland, the ways they seek membership and belonging in their communities of practice, and the ways in which they develop sociohistorical understandings across the languages and cultures they are part of. It sheds light on schooling and family communities and the role they play in the socialization processes of immigrant children.

This critical study provides a deep interrogation of the sociohistorical and language socialisation practices of Polish young people as they negotiate the complexities of their social and family worlds. A must-read for gaining a contemporary and nuanced insight into young people's agency as they navigate the deeply embedded matrix of language, power and identity in an increasingly linguistically diverse Irish society.