Language Acquisition and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives

This is an outstanding collection of papers by top scholars in a range of disciplines who shed stimulating, complementary insights into the social, cognitive and semiotic frameworks that shape both the acquisition of language, and the constitution of social actors through that process. The intentionally loose ecological framing of the volume provides an arena within which a range of perspectives, all united by their opposition to a mechanistic view of language acquisition, can enter into dialogue with each other. This is a most stimulating collection, with a range of insightful investigations of settings as diverse as an autistic child learning to interact with others on the playing field, professional gate-keeping encounters, and foreign language classrooms.