Affective stances in teacher-novice student interactions: Language, embodiment, and willingness to learn in a Swedish primary classroom

The present study explores a child, language, and cultural novice's affective and moral socialization during her first year in a Swedish first-grade classroom. Within the language socialization framework, it focuses on the lexico-grammatical and embodied organization of the novice's affectively charged noncompliant responses to (teacher) instructional directives, and the teachers' socializing responsive moves (contextualizing them within local and wider societal values and ideologies). The methods adopted combine a microanalytic approach with ethnographic analyses of socialization within a classroom community. Longitudinal tracking of the novice's stances demonstrated a trajectory across which socialization into normatively predictable cultural patterns did not occur. As shown, the student's affective stances and the teachers' socializing responses were consequential for the emergence of her "bad subject," that is, her socioculturally problematic identity (from a "resigned" to an "oppositional" student who was "unwilling" to learn). Such deviant cases, it is argued, provide insights into the contested and dynamic aspects of second language socialization and demonstrate how affective (and moral) stances are mobilized as resources in the indexing of institutional identities.