BECOMING FIRST-GRADERS IN AN L2 - AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF L2 SOCIALIZATION

This ethnographic report ''thickly describes'' (Geertz, 1973) the participation of ESL children in the daily classroom events of a main-stream first-grade classroom. Data for this paper come from a year-long study of one classroom in an international school on a college campus in the U.S. Using a language socialization and micropolitical orientation, the report describes how, through socially significant interactional routines, the children and other members of the classroom jointly constructed the ESL children's identities, social relations, and ideologies as well as their communicative competence in that setting. The sociocultural ecology of the community, school, and classroom shaped the kinds of microinteractions that occurred and ,thus the nature of their language learning over the course of the year.